With Shakespeare taking up residence in a part of their brains almost from the moment they’re born, the British possess an inherently finer knack for writing in the Queen’s language than we Americans. To be sure, there are fine American writers, but we’ll never, ever be as good with English as the English. This is both a bad thing and, as you will see, a good one.
The Nuffield Review, released a few days ago, is the first comprehensive review of British education for 14- to 19-year-olds in England and Wales in 50 years. (The U.K. system doesn’t quite jibe with ours; the subject group approximates our high-schoolers, with a year of college added on.) The review team, funded by the independent Nuffield Foundation, was led by Professor Richard Pring of Oxford, but included several others from different institutions.
The study took six years to complete, and it amounts to what they call “a ringing indictment” of contemporary English education, particularly for failing to serve English “Neets” (i.e., teenagers who are not in education, employment, or training, and are likely to end up jobless).
The review minces no words, and blames much of the problem of disaffected youth on the English education establishment, in cahoots with the government, for imposing its wretched educationalese on schools. Pupils have been turned into “consumers,” curricula are now “delivered,” and success is measured by “audits” (i.e., tests). British teachers are compelled to use such terms as “performance indicators,” “measurable inputs,” “outputs,” “targets,” “customers,” “deliverers,” and “efficiency gains.” That last one is a howler: It signifies — get this — cuts in funding.
My fave Orwellian nonsense word is “performativity” (which is the allegedly positive effect that government monitoring has on achieving “targets”). But other phrases that should be up for Big Brother Awards are “level descriptor” (the outcomes that a learner should attain), “dialogic teaching” (an emphasis on speaking and listening between teachers and pupils — now there’s a novel idea) and “articulated progression” (allowing pupils options for their next step in the qualification system).
The review argues that when educrats use the Orwellian language of “performance management,” they “are undermining teenagers’ education by turning them into ‘customers’ rather than students.” [Note: The report itself — not merely me — uses the word “Orwellian” to thrash the educational system.] In turn, the review concludes, this destroys learning for everyone — including the brightest of the academic bunch — and creates overall social alienation.
With no route to success other than through academic tests and some kind of university education — no alternative curricula for kids with a creative bent, or a love of fixing machines, or making music, or making things with plants and earth, or hair or food, or whatever — the result is that at least half the kids have ended up not merely miserable losers, but internalizing the idea that they’re hopeless miserable losers. The review, in sum, argues there’s a strong and direct connection between these disaffected youth and English outcomes-assessment practices.
To their dubious credit, however, the British — equipped with their superior aptitude for the English language — while going about the business of destroying a kind of education that takes account of the full human being, have created some fabulous assessment jargon. It’s much more powerful and intimidating than anything we’ve got. Why, we Americans are practically plain-spoken compared to the English. Our “rubrics” — crammed with “mission statements,” “learning goals”, “assessment goals,” “mappings,” “interpretations,” and “concluding loops” — were at first applied to K-12 education, and are now spreading like kudzu over American higher education. And you know what? While we’re probably doing almost as good a job at strangling the last breaths of humanity, passion, and excitement out of all levels of education, we’re linguistically downright pathetic, in our description of what we’re doing, compared to our British counterparts.
Perhaps we on this side of the Pond should be thankful that we’re not quite as handy at Will Shakespeare taking up residence in a part of their brains almost from the moment they’re born, the British possess an inherently finer knack for writing in the Queen’s language than we Americans. To be sure, there are fine American writers, but we’ll never, ever be as good with English as the English. This is both a bad thing and, as you will see, a good one.
The Nuffield Review, released a few days ago, is the first comprehensive review of British education for 14- to 19-year-olds in England and Wales in 50 years. (The U.K. system doesn’t quite jibe with ours; the subject group approximates our high-schoolers, with a year of college added on.) The review team, funded by the independent Nuffield Foundation, was led by Professor Richard Pring of Oxford, but included several others from different institutions.
The study took six years to complete, and it amounts to what they call “a ringing indictment” of contemporary English education, particularly for failing to serve English “Neets” (i.e., teenagers who are not in education, employment, or training, and are likely to end up jobless).
The review minces no words, and blames much of the problem of disaffected youth on the English education establishment, in cahoots with the government, for imposing its wretched educationalese on schools. Pupils have been turned into “consumers,” curricula are now “delivered,” and success is measured by “audits” (i.e., tests). British teachers are compelled to use such terms as “performance indicators,” “measurable inputs,” “outputs,” “targets,” “customers,” “deliverers,” and “efficiency gains.” That last one is a howler: It signifies — get this — cuts in funding.
My fave Orwellian nonsense word is “performativity” (which is the allegedly positive effect that government monitoring has on achieving “targets”). But other phrases that should be up for Big Brother Awards are “level descriptor” (the outcomes that a learner should attain), “dialogic teaching” (an emphasis on speaking and listening between teachers and pupils — now there’s a novel idea) and “articulated progression” (allowing pupils options for their next step in the qualification system).
The review argues that when educrats use the Orwellian language of “performance management,” they “are undermining teenagers’ education by turning them into ‘customers’ rather than students.” [Note: The report itself — not merely me — uses the word “Orwellian” to thrash the educational system.] In turn, the review concludes, this destroys learning for everyone — including the brightest of the academic bunch — and creates overall social alienation.
With no route to success other than through academic tests and some kind of university education — no alternative curricula for kids with a creative bent, or a love of fixing machines, or making music, or making things with plants and earth, or hair or food, or whatever — the result is that at least half the kids have ended up not merely miserable losers, but internalizing the idea that they’re hopeless miserable losers. The review, in sum, argues there’s a strong and direct connection between these disaffected youth and English outcomes-assessment practices.
To their dubious credit, however, the British — equipped with their superior aptitude for the English language — while going about the business of destroying a kind of education that takes account of the full human being, have created some fabulous assessment jargon. It’s much more powerful and intimidating than anything we’ve got. Why, we Americans are practically plain-spoken compared to the English. Our “rubrics” — crammed with “mission statements,” “learning goals”, “assessment goals,” “mappings,” “interpretations,” and “concluding loops” — were at first applied to K-12 education, and are now spreading like kudzu over American higher education. And you know what? While we’re probably doing almost as good a job at strangling the last breaths of humanity, passion, and excitement out of all levels of education, we’re linguistically downright pathetic, in our description of what we’re doing, compared to our British counterparts.
Perhaps we on this side of the Pond should be thankful that we’re not quite as handy at bureaucratic, doublespeak educationalese as the British. As the review reminds readers, “The words we use shape our thinking.” And since we use them less well than the British, it will probably take our own outcomes-assessment movement just a tad longer to use them to bury education.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
National Interests or Secular Paranoia?
Tucked into a speech to the French parliament that concentrated on the French economic mess, President Sarkozy of France said yesterday that the French are opposed to women wearing burqas (the garment worn by some Muslim women that fully covers their face and body save for a tiny space for the eyes) in France. He didn’t flinch from using strong words. The burqa is “against French values,” he said, adding that the French “cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity.” He said the burqa “is not a religious sign, it’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement. I want to say it solemnly: It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.” Sarkozy thereby gave his backing to a multi-party initiative, by several legislators, for a parliamentary commission to study the burqa and how to stop its spread.
French hostility toward the burqa is said to lie in their concern that the women who wear it are forced to do so (usually by their husbands). Obviously, hidden in this attitude lurks a hefty amount of anti-Muslim sentiment as well. The French are intolerant toward — even suspicious of — religion of any kind spilling over into secular life. Their revolution, unlike ours, was deeply anti-clerical (as well as anti-monarchical and anti-aristocratic), and they used their national razor with a frenzied joy to slice off the head of more than one priest.
The effects of that revolution are felt today. In a law enacted in 2004, the French banned students of any religion from wearing any overt religious garb in public schools — no Muslim headscarves, Jewish scull caps or large Christian crosses are permitted. The French idea is that immigrants should assimilate to the French way, which is secular, although their attitude that no immigrant could ever possibly become fully French makes this nearly impossible.
In America, our attitude is entirely different. When it comes to sartorial matters, more or less anything goes. In Cairo, President Obama took pains to mention that Americans have no problem with Muslim women wearing headscarves, but in Normandy he acknowledged that he understood the French point of view. Obama acknowledges that our different national histories have led to different conclusions about how religion fits into society.
Head scarves here are one thing, but they’re a far cry from burqas. As a friend of mine put it — bluntly expressing the horror many Westerners like me feel at the sight of a burqa — “What kind of society dresses its women in bags?” Women in the West gave up the veil during the Renaissance, and in liberating their faces for public view, they simultaneously unleashed public acceptance of female vanity (a bad thing, when in excess), as well as the female intellect (a good thing, even in small doses). Putting a public face on women brought women into the public sphere.
Last fall, I stepped into a New York subway car and sat down to a startling sight — two women, seated across from me, by chance seated side-by-side. On the one side was a Muslim woman in a full niqab (different from a burqa, which has a screen, the niqab is a completely black, top-to-toe covering with a small horizontal slit for the eyes). On the other side, squeezed up against her (the subway was crowded), was a young twenty-something mother, baby tucked into a stroller in front of her. She was dressed in one of those tight, sleeveless spandex tops that explicitly reveals the form and cleavage of the breasts, long dangly earrings, a very, very short skirt, and platform heels.
Considered separately, the outfits might very well each have annoyed me, were I to have let my mind go that way. They were the bookends of the way women exist in the modern world. Taken together, however, they were hilarious — worthy of a New Yorker cover. (If no one’s done this yet, I hereby offer the idea).
Although the woman in black sort of scared me, in a mild sort of way, I was more irritated than scared. The outfit stood for female oppression. But as I said, the deeper reason is because when there’s no face in public there’s no face at all. On the other hand, the spandexed woman frightened me as well. She, in her own way, also stood for female oppression. For whom, exactly, was she in such a state of undress, if not for others who are not the father of her child?
At the same time, the sight of these two women sitting together on a subway in New York was, in retrospect, uplifting, perhaps even beautiful, in a Walt Whitman, Leaves of Subway sort of way. This is democratic America, after all, not democratic France. We’re probably about as tolerant as a society can get.
French hostility toward the burqa is said to lie in their concern that the women who wear it are forced to do so (usually by their husbands). Obviously, hidden in this attitude lurks a hefty amount of anti-Muslim sentiment as well. The French are intolerant toward — even suspicious of — religion of any kind spilling over into secular life. Their revolution, unlike ours, was deeply anti-clerical (as well as anti-monarchical and anti-aristocratic), and they used their national razor with a frenzied joy to slice off the head of more than one priest.
The effects of that revolution are felt today. In a law enacted in 2004, the French banned students of any religion from wearing any overt religious garb in public schools — no Muslim headscarves, Jewish scull caps or large Christian crosses are permitted. The French idea is that immigrants should assimilate to the French way, which is secular, although their attitude that no immigrant could ever possibly become fully French makes this nearly impossible.
In America, our attitude is entirely different. When it comes to sartorial matters, more or less anything goes. In Cairo, President Obama took pains to mention that Americans have no problem with Muslim women wearing headscarves, but in Normandy he acknowledged that he understood the French point of view. Obama acknowledges that our different national histories have led to different conclusions about how religion fits into society.
Head scarves here are one thing, but they’re a far cry from burqas. As a friend of mine put it — bluntly expressing the horror many Westerners like me feel at the sight of a burqa — “What kind of society dresses its women in bags?” Women in the West gave up the veil during the Renaissance, and in liberating their faces for public view, they simultaneously unleashed public acceptance of female vanity (a bad thing, when in excess), as well as the female intellect (a good thing, even in small doses). Putting a public face on women brought women into the public sphere.
Last fall, I stepped into a New York subway car and sat down to a startling sight — two women, seated across from me, by chance seated side-by-side. On the one side was a Muslim woman in a full niqab (different from a burqa, which has a screen, the niqab is a completely black, top-to-toe covering with a small horizontal slit for the eyes). On the other side, squeezed up against her (the subway was crowded), was a young twenty-something mother, baby tucked into a stroller in front of her. She was dressed in one of those tight, sleeveless spandex tops that explicitly reveals the form and cleavage of the breasts, long dangly earrings, a very, very short skirt, and platform heels.
Considered separately, the outfits might very well each have annoyed me, were I to have let my mind go that way. They were the bookends of the way women exist in the modern world. Taken together, however, they were hilarious — worthy of a New Yorker cover. (If no one’s done this yet, I hereby offer the idea).
Although the woman in black sort of scared me, in a mild sort of way, I was more irritated than scared. The outfit stood for female oppression. But as I said, the deeper reason is because when there’s no face in public there’s no face at all. On the other hand, the spandexed woman frightened me as well. She, in her own way, also stood for female oppression. For whom, exactly, was she in such a state of undress, if not for others who are not the father of her child?
At the same time, the sight of these two women sitting together on a subway in New York was, in retrospect, uplifting, perhaps even beautiful, in a Walt Whitman, Leaves of Subway sort of way. This is democratic America, after all, not democratic France. We’re probably about as tolerant as a society can get.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Is Free Speech Absolute? Where Do We Draw The Line?
Eleven days. Three troubled extremists. Three hate-fueled killings.
It was enough to prompt U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder this week to propose new hate crime laws that would, he said, "not tolerate murder, or the threat of violence, masquerading as political activism."
But the recent fatal attacks on an abortion doctor, an Army recruiter and a guard at the nation's Holocaust Museum have also launched an intense national debate about what the spate of targeted killings mean.
One signal question: Do others — from Internet and talk-radio hate-mongers to right- and left-wing pundits and politicians who dabble in incendiary speech — bear some responsibility for the killings?
No matter where one's free speech and political beliefs may lie, the killings — allegedly carried out by an anti-abortion, anti-government zealot, an anti-military Muslim convert and a virulent anti-Semite — have provided a sobering reminder of what lurks in the nation's darker corners.
"We've seen in the last few weeks some pretty shocking violence in the United States," says political historian Donald Critchlow.
But what, or whether, anything should be done about the extremist rants and general threats emanating from those corners remains, as always, a stubborn constitutional free speech question.
And it raises another one the nation has long wrestled with: Would enforced silence of the most abhorrent speech prove a more dangerous enemy of the good?
A Climate Conducive To Violence
Brett Barnett is the author of Untangling the Web of Hate, a book about online hate sites and whether they are worthy of First Amendment protections.
"My conclusions then were, though the speech on hate sites may be repugnant, I found nothing unconstitutional," says Barnett, an assistant professor of communications at Slippery Rock University.
"But since I've written the book, rhetoric on the hate sites has changed drastically," he says. "The conclusions I drew four years ago may be different now."
The election of Barack Obama, the nation's first black president, has prompted an upswing in white supremacist activity online, according to a new report by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund.
The bad economy, anxiety over immigration, widening political polarization and a three-decade trend of growing mistrust of government have also contributed to a climate that is more conducive to extremist groups, says Critchlow, a professor at St. Louis University and author, most recently, of The Conservative Ascendancy.
"The distrust of the government has created a very unhealthy political climate," he says, "and we are seeing a political polarization where opponents are denouncing each other in deeply personal and moralistic terms."
"This is on top of a high moralism found on the extreme left and right that allows for individuals to take the law into their own hands to fulfill what they believe are 'God's purposes,' " Critchlow says.
Experts who track hate groups say a controversial April 7 Department of Homeland Security memo, which said the current economic and political climate was fueling a resurgence of right-wing extremism, including among far-right anti-abortionists and anti-Semites, accurately described general conditions.
But the memo stumbled by providing "conjectured conditions" about what might lead to violence, Critchlow says. DHS chief Janet Napolitano apologized to veterans' groups after conservatives reacted angrily to the identification of military veterans as vulnerable to extremist recruiting.
Networked Hate
Though major hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan no longer have the boots-on-the-ground organizations they once did, extremists have been mastering the art of online organizing.
The Leadership Conference report, which tracked activity over two decades, said social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are being used by groups to bring together splintered and far-flung members.
Barnett says hate-site trackers estimate that there are more than 900 such sites now, including the neo-Nazi Stormfront, which launched in 1995 and is recognized as the first major hate site.
"The Internet has really given voice to groups that we thought were once dying," he says.
But some trackers are puzzling over whether the Internet, with its ease of communication and duplicative nature, may make hate movements seem larger than they actually are.
Free Speech In Peril?
Today's conditions mark a serious test for free speech, but the test is not unprecedented, says Monroe Freedman, a Hofstra University law professor.
Recalling the "red scare" and McCarthyism of the 1950s, Freedman warns that the pendulum can swing too far in the other direction. He remembers two brilliant scholars, twin brothers, who were a year behind him at Harvard Law School. David and Jonathan Lubell were pressured by Harvard to give up their top positions at the Law School Record and had to fight efforts to have them expelled.
Their offense? Called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, they cited their constitutional right to free speech and due process, and refused to answer questions about their political activism.
"There's a lot of scary stuff going on out there now, no question about it," Freedman says, but he adds that he is suspicious about "mythical, nostalgic thinking" by those who would suggest that the climate is worse now than it's ever been.
"The bottom line is that we've seen it before," says Freedman, who served as the first executive of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which laid the groundwork for the museum.
Freedman and his Hofstra law school colleague Eric Freedman, no relation, co-edited the book Group Defamation and Freedom of Speech: The Relationship Between Language and Violence.
Speech can provoke violence, Eric Freedman says. But his co-editor says it is difficult, if not impossible, to draw a connection between provocative speech and action by the likes of James von Brunn, who is charged with killing the Holocaust Museum security guard.
Barnett puts it this way: "It could be argued that right-wing talk radio stokes some of these fires. But the fires were already burning."
The 'True Threats Test' Of Speech
A 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision addressed the issue of where the line of constitutionally accepted free speech should be drawn.
Then-Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's opinion in the case defined "true threats" as "statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals." The decision notes that the threat does not have to be acted on to fall under the definition.
Lower courts have not applied the standard uniformly, but Barnett says the true threats standard would naturally apply as a test of the constitutionality of extreme speech on the Internet.
But the professors Freedman both caution against pushing back too vigorously on any speech that doesn't rise to the level of "clear and present danger."
The clear and present danger standard dates to a World War I-era Supreme Court decision that limited the ability of government to regulate speech unless the words "are used in such circumstances to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that the United States Congress has a right to prevent."
It has been interpreted as a substitute for what was known as the "bad tendency" judicial test adopted by the court in the early 1900s, and strongly opposed by free speech advocates.
Under the bad tendency standard, Eric Freedman says, someone who says, for example, that he believes Judaism is the equivalent of astrology is someone who will kill Jews.
"Any attempt at repression will, as a practical matter, make things worse," he says. "We are taking a risk, a calculated risk, that repression would lead to far worse outcomes."
"Nothing is going to stop people who are insane from doing insane things," he says.
Monroe Freedman says the best antidote to hate speech is criticism, boycotts and "good speech."
"I just have to stick with my civil libertarian position, in part because I don't want any government official, including judges, deciding which hate speech qualifies for suppression short of a clear and present danger," he says.
As ugly as abhorrent speech is, its suppression would, the Freedmans argue, certainly be the enemy of the good.
It was enough to prompt U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder this week to propose new hate crime laws that would, he said, "not tolerate murder, or the threat of violence, masquerading as political activism."
But the recent fatal attacks on an abortion doctor, an Army recruiter and a guard at the nation's Holocaust Museum have also launched an intense national debate about what the spate of targeted killings mean.
One signal question: Do others — from Internet and talk-radio hate-mongers to right- and left-wing pundits and politicians who dabble in incendiary speech — bear some responsibility for the killings?
No matter where one's free speech and political beliefs may lie, the killings — allegedly carried out by an anti-abortion, anti-government zealot, an anti-military Muslim convert and a virulent anti-Semite — have provided a sobering reminder of what lurks in the nation's darker corners.
"We've seen in the last few weeks some pretty shocking violence in the United States," says political historian Donald Critchlow.
But what, or whether, anything should be done about the extremist rants and general threats emanating from those corners remains, as always, a stubborn constitutional free speech question.
And it raises another one the nation has long wrestled with: Would enforced silence of the most abhorrent speech prove a more dangerous enemy of the good?
A Climate Conducive To Violence
Brett Barnett is the author of Untangling the Web of Hate, a book about online hate sites and whether they are worthy of First Amendment protections.
"My conclusions then were, though the speech on hate sites may be repugnant, I found nothing unconstitutional," says Barnett, an assistant professor of communications at Slippery Rock University.
"But since I've written the book, rhetoric on the hate sites has changed drastically," he says. "The conclusions I drew four years ago may be different now."
The election of Barack Obama, the nation's first black president, has prompted an upswing in white supremacist activity online, according to a new report by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund.
The bad economy, anxiety over immigration, widening political polarization and a three-decade trend of growing mistrust of government have also contributed to a climate that is more conducive to extremist groups, says Critchlow, a professor at St. Louis University and author, most recently, of The Conservative Ascendancy.
"The distrust of the government has created a very unhealthy political climate," he says, "and we are seeing a political polarization where opponents are denouncing each other in deeply personal and moralistic terms."
"This is on top of a high moralism found on the extreme left and right that allows for individuals to take the law into their own hands to fulfill what they believe are 'God's purposes,' " Critchlow says.
Experts who track hate groups say a controversial April 7 Department of Homeland Security memo, which said the current economic and political climate was fueling a resurgence of right-wing extremism, including among far-right anti-abortionists and anti-Semites, accurately described general conditions.
But the memo stumbled by providing "conjectured conditions" about what might lead to violence, Critchlow says. DHS chief Janet Napolitano apologized to veterans' groups after conservatives reacted angrily to the identification of military veterans as vulnerable to extremist recruiting.
Networked Hate
Though major hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan no longer have the boots-on-the-ground organizations they once did, extremists have been mastering the art of online organizing.
The Leadership Conference report, which tracked activity over two decades, said social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are being used by groups to bring together splintered and far-flung members.
Barnett says hate-site trackers estimate that there are more than 900 such sites now, including the neo-Nazi Stormfront, which launched in 1995 and is recognized as the first major hate site.
"The Internet has really given voice to groups that we thought were once dying," he says.
But some trackers are puzzling over whether the Internet, with its ease of communication and duplicative nature, may make hate movements seem larger than they actually are.
Free Speech In Peril?
Today's conditions mark a serious test for free speech, but the test is not unprecedented, says Monroe Freedman, a Hofstra University law professor.
Recalling the "red scare" and McCarthyism of the 1950s, Freedman warns that the pendulum can swing too far in the other direction. He remembers two brilliant scholars, twin brothers, who were a year behind him at Harvard Law School. David and Jonathan Lubell were pressured by Harvard to give up their top positions at the Law School Record and had to fight efforts to have them expelled.
Their offense? Called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, they cited their constitutional right to free speech and due process, and refused to answer questions about their political activism.
"There's a lot of scary stuff going on out there now, no question about it," Freedman says, but he adds that he is suspicious about "mythical, nostalgic thinking" by those who would suggest that the climate is worse now than it's ever been.
"The bottom line is that we've seen it before," says Freedman, who served as the first executive of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which laid the groundwork for the museum.
Freedman and his Hofstra law school colleague Eric Freedman, no relation, co-edited the book Group Defamation and Freedom of Speech: The Relationship Between Language and Violence.
Speech can provoke violence, Eric Freedman says. But his co-editor says it is difficult, if not impossible, to draw a connection between provocative speech and action by the likes of James von Brunn, who is charged with killing the Holocaust Museum security guard.
Barnett puts it this way: "It could be argued that right-wing talk radio stokes some of these fires. But the fires were already burning."
The 'True Threats Test' Of Speech
A 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision addressed the issue of where the line of constitutionally accepted free speech should be drawn.
Then-Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's opinion in the case defined "true threats" as "statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals." The decision notes that the threat does not have to be acted on to fall under the definition.
Lower courts have not applied the standard uniformly, but Barnett says the true threats standard would naturally apply as a test of the constitutionality of extreme speech on the Internet.
But the professors Freedman both caution against pushing back too vigorously on any speech that doesn't rise to the level of "clear and present danger."
The clear and present danger standard dates to a World War I-era Supreme Court decision that limited the ability of government to regulate speech unless the words "are used in such circumstances to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that the United States Congress has a right to prevent."
It has been interpreted as a substitute for what was known as the "bad tendency" judicial test adopted by the court in the early 1900s, and strongly opposed by free speech advocates.
Under the bad tendency standard, Eric Freedman says, someone who says, for example, that he believes Judaism is the equivalent of astrology is someone who will kill Jews.
"Any attempt at repression will, as a practical matter, make things worse," he says. "We are taking a risk, a calculated risk, that repression would lead to far worse outcomes."
"Nothing is going to stop people who are insane from doing insane things," he says.
Monroe Freedman says the best antidote to hate speech is criticism, boycotts and "good speech."
"I just have to stick with my civil libertarian position, in part because I don't want any government official, including judges, deciding which hate speech qualifies for suppression short of a clear and present danger," he says.
As ugly as abhorrent speech is, its suppression would, the Freedmans argue, certainly be the enemy of the good.
Have Young Germans Freed Themselves From The Collective Guilt Of Their Parents?
In January 1933, some 522,000 Jews by religious definition lived in Germany. Over half of these individuals, approximately 304,000 Jews, emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship, leaving only approximately 214,000 Jews in Germany proper (1937 borders) on the eve of World War II.
In the years between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime had brought radical and daunting social, economic, and communal change to the German Jewish community. Six years of Nazi-sponsored legislation had marginalized and disenfranchised Germany's Jewish citizenry and had expelled Jews from the professions and from commercial life. By early 1939, only about 16 percent of Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind. Thousands of Jews remained interned in concentration camps following the mass arrests in the aftermath of Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) in November 1938.
In May 1943, Nazi German authorities reported that the Reich was “judenrein” (“free of Jews”). By this time, mass deportations had left fewer than 20,000 Jews in Germany. Some survived because they were married to non-Jews or because race laws classified them as Mischlinge (of mixed ancestry, or part Jewish) and were thus temporarily exempt from deportation. Others, called “U-Boats” or “submarines,” lived in hiding and evaded arrest and deportation, often with the aid of non-Jewish Germans who sympathized with their plight. Hitler had many willing collaborators.
In all, the Germans and their collaborators killed between 160,000 and 180,000 German Jews in the Holocaust, including most of those Jews deported out of Germany.
The stigma of the Holocaust appeared to infect the entire post-war German population with a collective sense of national guilt. Few exhibited any sense of national identity.
Today, more and more Germans take pride in their national identity. They have developed a laid-back national consciousness, far from the sabre-rattling jingoism of the past, writes Mathias Schreiber for Spiegel Magazine.
Whether he laughs a little too loudly or shakes hands a little too forcefully, whether he whines or whoops it up, skimps on food or drinks too much beer, or whether he (young man) drives too fast or she (old lady) too slowly – there’s one thing your garden-variety German can be sure of: some wise guy is always liable to mosey on over and say, “You’re acting typically German.”
But what's ironic is that this smart-aleck is bound to be a typical German himself. In his strained efforts to set himself apart from the common run of his ill-famed tribe, he is actually outing himself as one of its active members.
Thomas Mann considered "kerndeutsch" (quintessentially German) the "collective penchant for self-criticism, often to the point of self-loathing, self-execration,” and deduced from that penchant that it could readily be amplified to the opposite extreme, namely to "the idea of world dominion”.
A good gauge of German self-loathing is the almost weekly polling of the population to monitor German sensibilities – and, particularly since German reunification, the resurgence of national pride.
One fairly ambitious specimen of this sort of survey – it took three years to complete – came out just last week. It bears the somewhat kitschy title “Being German: A newfound national pride in harmony with the heart”. Subtitle: “German Identity”.
The main findings of the study, in which some 2,000 German citizens age 14 and upwards filled out a questionnaire of unprecedented thoroughness and nuance, are rather surprising. Nearly 60% of those surveyed shared the sentiment “I’m proud to be German.” Even more, 69%, rejected the notion that Europe or the international community is more important than their own country. And 78%, if free to choose their nation, would opt for German nationality with “near or absolute certainty”.
60 years after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, concluded the authors of the study, “Germans seem to be gradually breathing freely again and overcoming their historical guilt”. But that doesn’t mean repressing the past. So rest assured: the right to normality that chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Social Democrat) once claimed for Germany is no cause for alarm.
This new attitude was conspicuous in the German reaction to the election of a Bavarian cardinal, one Joseph Ratzinger, to the papacy in 2005. The ingenious line in the Bild newspaper, “Wir sind Papst” (“We are Pope”), blending pride with self-mockery, was at once spot on and deliberately, blithely, wide of the mark. When, a year later, the cheerful, hospitable hosts of the FIFA World Cup were actually quite content with third place for the German team, the emerging picture came more sharply into focus: there was a new sense of togetherness – but of the street-party, not the street-fighting kind.
The compelling reasons why Germans identify with their nation are entirely ahistorical and harmless – sometimes even verging on the ridiculous. Every other German is proud of the Teutonic knack for invention: they think Germans are the “world’s best tinkerers and inventors” and can “make something out of anything”. 91% of those surveyed have a high opinion of their compatriots’ sense of duty and achievement; almost just as many believe the love of regional customs and of rules and order is a characteristic national trait. The accomplishments of their engineers, business leaders, craftsmen and even athletes are evidently more important to most Germans than those of a Goethe, Bismarck or Adenauer.
Germans have undeniably become patriotic again, but this new brand of patriotism is laid-back, pragmatic, federalist, regionalist, individualistic – in a word, contradictory.
In his latest, remarkable book Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen (“The Germans and Their Myths”), Berlin political scientist Herfried Münkler writes that the Federal Republic is a “territory by and large devoid of myths”, a country without a “grand political epic” like that of the French Revolution in 1789. Suchlike epics are, he says, important for the development of a sense of togetherness as well as for a national identity.
The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 had all the prerequisites to qualify as just such a founding myth. But not much came of it because the freedom-seeking heroes of the story only came from one part of the country: the east.
In the years between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime had brought radical and daunting social, economic, and communal change to the German Jewish community. Six years of Nazi-sponsored legislation had marginalized and disenfranchised Germany's Jewish citizenry and had expelled Jews from the professions and from commercial life. By early 1939, only about 16 percent of Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind. Thousands of Jews remained interned in concentration camps following the mass arrests in the aftermath of Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) in November 1938.
In May 1943, Nazi German authorities reported that the Reich was “judenrein” (“free of Jews”). By this time, mass deportations had left fewer than 20,000 Jews in Germany. Some survived because they were married to non-Jews or because race laws classified them as Mischlinge (of mixed ancestry, or part Jewish) and were thus temporarily exempt from deportation. Others, called “U-Boats” or “submarines,” lived in hiding and evaded arrest and deportation, often with the aid of non-Jewish Germans who sympathized with their plight. Hitler had many willing collaborators.
In all, the Germans and their collaborators killed between 160,000 and 180,000 German Jews in the Holocaust, including most of those Jews deported out of Germany.
The stigma of the Holocaust appeared to infect the entire post-war German population with a collective sense of national guilt. Few exhibited any sense of national identity.
Today, more and more Germans take pride in their national identity. They have developed a laid-back national consciousness, far from the sabre-rattling jingoism of the past, writes Mathias Schreiber for Spiegel Magazine.
Whether he laughs a little too loudly or shakes hands a little too forcefully, whether he whines or whoops it up, skimps on food or drinks too much beer, or whether he (young man) drives too fast or she (old lady) too slowly – there’s one thing your garden-variety German can be sure of: some wise guy is always liable to mosey on over and say, “You’re acting typically German.”
But what's ironic is that this smart-aleck is bound to be a typical German himself. In his strained efforts to set himself apart from the common run of his ill-famed tribe, he is actually outing himself as one of its active members.
Thomas Mann considered "kerndeutsch" (quintessentially German) the "collective penchant for self-criticism, often to the point of self-loathing, self-execration,” and deduced from that penchant that it could readily be amplified to the opposite extreme, namely to "the idea of world dominion”.
A good gauge of German self-loathing is the almost weekly polling of the population to monitor German sensibilities – and, particularly since German reunification, the resurgence of national pride.
One fairly ambitious specimen of this sort of survey – it took three years to complete – came out just last week. It bears the somewhat kitschy title “Being German: A newfound national pride in harmony with the heart”. Subtitle: “German Identity”.
The main findings of the study, in which some 2,000 German citizens age 14 and upwards filled out a questionnaire of unprecedented thoroughness and nuance, are rather surprising. Nearly 60% of those surveyed shared the sentiment “I’m proud to be German.” Even more, 69%, rejected the notion that Europe or the international community is more important than their own country. And 78%, if free to choose their nation, would opt for German nationality with “near or absolute certainty”.
60 years after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, concluded the authors of the study, “Germans seem to be gradually breathing freely again and overcoming their historical guilt”. But that doesn’t mean repressing the past. So rest assured: the right to normality that chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Social Democrat) once claimed for Germany is no cause for alarm.
This new attitude was conspicuous in the German reaction to the election of a Bavarian cardinal, one Joseph Ratzinger, to the papacy in 2005. The ingenious line in the Bild newspaper, “Wir sind Papst” (“We are Pope”), blending pride with self-mockery, was at once spot on and deliberately, blithely, wide of the mark. When, a year later, the cheerful, hospitable hosts of the FIFA World Cup were actually quite content with third place for the German team, the emerging picture came more sharply into focus: there was a new sense of togetherness – but of the street-party, not the street-fighting kind.
The compelling reasons why Germans identify with their nation are entirely ahistorical and harmless – sometimes even verging on the ridiculous. Every other German is proud of the Teutonic knack for invention: they think Germans are the “world’s best tinkerers and inventors” and can “make something out of anything”. 91% of those surveyed have a high opinion of their compatriots’ sense of duty and achievement; almost just as many believe the love of regional customs and of rules and order is a characteristic national trait. The accomplishments of their engineers, business leaders, craftsmen and even athletes are evidently more important to most Germans than those of a Goethe, Bismarck or Adenauer.
Germans have undeniably become patriotic again, but this new brand of patriotism is laid-back, pragmatic, federalist, regionalist, individualistic – in a word, contradictory.
In his latest, remarkable book Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen (“The Germans and Their Myths”), Berlin political scientist Herfried Münkler writes that the Federal Republic is a “territory by and large devoid of myths”, a country without a “grand political epic” like that of the French Revolution in 1789. Suchlike epics are, he says, important for the development of a sense of togetherness as well as for a national identity.
The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 had all the prerequisites to qualify as just such a founding myth. But not much came of it because the freedom-seeking heroes of the story only came from one part of the country: the east.
Should English Be The Language of The World?
In "Translate" his latest essay, Belgian philosopher and jurist
François Ost, sings the praises of multilingualism, the one
alternative to the hegemony of global English.
Misunderstanding – let’s see now: Most of the time, we consider it a
blight, an insidious worm that spoils the fruit of communication. On
closer scrutiny, however, it turns out to be an opportunity, just as a
mistake is an opportunity for learning in that it makes us
cross-examine ourselves, correct ourselves and progress. If everything
we said were instantaneously grasped, if we got one another’s message
“loud and clear” every time, we would only need to talk once, and
there would be no need to have a(nother) word with one another.
The same goes for languages. There are roughly 6,000 of them around.
Some are neighbours, sisters, cousins, others complete strangers,
light-years away. So we are inclined to think that if there were only
one single clear-cut, perfect language in which things were reflected
exactly as in a verbal mirror, everyone could understand everyone else
effortlessly, and we would elude the catastrophe of Babel: atomisation
and the inconsolable misfortune of being condemned to the treachery of
translation. Well, no. This lone language, this scrap of the dream of
the Ursprache or “original language” – “the very one in which God and
Adam conversed in Paradise” – would be a deadly bore. It would nip
every conversation in the bud and put quite a damper on the
“potentialities of meaning”.
So long live Babel! Long live the sin of presumption that tempted men
into building a tower as high as the sky, in punishment for which God
“scattered them abroad upon the face of all the earth” and “confounded
the language of all the earth” – that very curse is a blessing in
disguise.
Globish.
This is the thesis of Traduire by François Ost (Fayard), a
philosopher/jurist, college professor in Geneva and vice-president of
the Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis in Brussels. This imposing
book – whose subtitle clearly reflects its object: to present a
“Defence and Illustration of Multilingualism” – is not missing a
single reference, footnote, or argument (the only thing missing is an
index of names). And although highly rigorous, convoking the likes of
Merleau-Ponty, Quine and Wittgenstein, Eco, Benveniste and Antoine
Berman, it is far from exclusively addressing specialists in the
philosophy of language, semiotics or lexicology. In the final
analysis, its subject is political: Europe thinks in several
languages, its language is translation, and it would be political and
cultural self-mutilation to submit to the hegemony of global English,
or Globish.
François Ost begins by analysing the founding myth of the tower of
Babel: 20-odd lines from Genesis (XI. 1–9), nine verses that are as
“rigorous as a short story by Kafka, enigmatic as the poetry of
Borges”, and which have given rise to endless literature. To begin
with, he focuses on the telling of the tale, which adheres to the
general stylistic economy of the Genesis narrative. He points up the
complex interweaving of its constituent themes, distinguishes the
various historical strata of its writing, then proceeds to a close
reading of the text, a virtually word-by-word commentary,
simultaneously comparing selected French translations and the leading
exegeses. Ultimately, in lieu of the “Babelian paradigm”, which has
provided endless food for thought in so many cultures, he glimpses an
“emerging paradigm of translation for a world that thinks of itself in
terms of a network and in terms of communication”.
“Hospitality”.
Traduire is essentially devoted to exploring this new model, which
obliges us to “think of language and translation together” (in such
diverse domains as interdisciplinary science and scholarship, dialogue
between religions and between philosophies, between international law
and national laws, civil society and its political representatives
etc.). Ost examines its “imaginary foundations, historical detours,
conceptual frontiers, linguistic presuppositions, ethical implications
and the political preconditions for its implementation”. The upshot is
a veritable hymn to multilingualism and to the “linguistic
hospitality” that is translation: a “wholly separate” and inventive
form of writing, which operates first within each language before
striking out to toil at its frontiers, and which makes the
“untranslatable” – an a priori obstacle – its “organ” and its
conditio sine qua non.
To translate is to betray, needless to say, but it is this betrayal
which, like misunderstanding, provides the best guarantee for the
ongoing pursuit of translation, discussion, exchange and “dialogical
thought”. “If translation were to succeed completely, the spectre of
the lone language would re-emerge, and the towers would begin wobbling
again.” In Babel and everywhere else.
François Ost, sings the praises of multilingualism, the one
alternative to the hegemony of global English.
Misunderstanding – let’s see now: Most of the time, we consider it a
blight, an insidious worm that spoils the fruit of communication. On
closer scrutiny, however, it turns out to be an opportunity, just as a
mistake is an opportunity for learning in that it makes us
cross-examine ourselves, correct ourselves and progress. If everything
we said were instantaneously grasped, if we got one another’s message
“loud and clear” every time, we would only need to talk once, and
there would be no need to have a(nother) word with one another.
The same goes for languages. There are roughly 6,000 of them around.
Some are neighbours, sisters, cousins, others complete strangers,
light-years away. So we are inclined to think that if there were only
one single clear-cut, perfect language in which things were reflected
exactly as in a verbal mirror, everyone could understand everyone else
effortlessly, and we would elude the catastrophe of Babel: atomisation
and the inconsolable misfortune of being condemned to the treachery of
translation. Well, no. This lone language, this scrap of the dream of
the Ursprache or “original language” – “the very one in which God and
Adam conversed in Paradise” – would be a deadly bore. It would nip
every conversation in the bud and put quite a damper on the
“potentialities of meaning”.
So long live Babel! Long live the sin of presumption that tempted men
into building a tower as high as the sky, in punishment for which God
“scattered them abroad upon the face of all the earth” and “confounded
the language of all the earth” – that very curse is a blessing in
disguise.
Globish.
This is the thesis of Traduire by François Ost (Fayard), a
philosopher/jurist, college professor in Geneva and vice-president of
the Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis in Brussels. This imposing
book – whose subtitle clearly reflects its object: to present a
“Defence and Illustration of Multilingualism” – is not missing a
single reference, footnote, or argument (the only thing missing is an
index of names). And although highly rigorous, convoking the likes of
Merleau-Ponty, Quine and Wittgenstein, Eco, Benveniste and Antoine
Berman, it is far from exclusively addressing specialists in the
philosophy of language, semiotics or lexicology. In the final
analysis, its subject is political: Europe thinks in several
languages, its language is translation, and it would be political and
cultural self-mutilation to submit to the hegemony of global English,
or Globish.
François Ost begins by analysing the founding myth of the tower of
Babel: 20-odd lines from Genesis (XI. 1–9), nine verses that are as
“rigorous as a short story by Kafka, enigmatic as the poetry of
Borges”, and which have given rise to endless literature. To begin
with, he focuses on the telling of the tale, which adheres to the
general stylistic economy of the Genesis narrative. He points up the
complex interweaving of its constituent themes, distinguishes the
various historical strata of its writing, then proceeds to a close
reading of the text, a virtually word-by-word commentary,
simultaneously comparing selected French translations and the leading
exegeses. Ultimately, in lieu of the “Babelian paradigm”, which has
provided endless food for thought in so many cultures, he glimpses an
“emerging paradigm of translation for a world that thinks of itself in
terms of a network and in terms of communication”.
“Hospitality”.
Traduire is essentially devoted to exploring this new model, which
obliges us to “think of language and translation together” (in such
diverse domains as interdisciplinary science and scholarship, dialogue
between religions and between philosophies, between international law
and national laws, civil society and its political representatives
etc.). Ost examines its “imaginary foundations, historical detours,
conceptual frontiers, linguistic presuppositions, ethical implications
and the political preconditions for its implementation”. The upshot is
a veritable hymn to multilingualism and to the “linguistic
hospitality” that is translation: a “wholly separate” and inventive
form of writing, which operates first within each language before
striking out to toil at its frontiers, and which makes the
“untranslatable” – an a priori obstacle – its “organ” and its
conditio sine qua non.
To translate is to betray, needless to say, but it is this betrayal
which, like misunderstanding, provides the best guarantee for the
ongoing pursuit of translation, discussion, exchange and “dialogical
thought”. “If translation were to succeed completely, the spectre of
the lone language would re-emerge, and the towers would begin wobbling
again.” In Babel and everywhere else.
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