Teaching at Lee University has brought back memories of things I experienced there before even I was drawn into their fledgling engineering program. Now that we are on our way to a building for same with the woes of the present world for a background, there’s something that has come back to mind that I think bears repeating.
In 2016–the same year That Man With the Orange Hair was elected to the White House the first time–my wife and I got to see Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado at Lee. The production was, to say the least, unconventional:
It was a strange production; it was one of those things where the audience sat on the stage and the performers did their thing in the seats. The program regaled us with the usual politically correct rubbish of “it isn’t about Asians.” (They could have chosen an all-Chinese or Korean cast; both would welcome a shot at making fun of the Japanese.) It had the potential of being a serious dud, but Lee University, as all the world knows now, has a deep bench of talent in singing and the performing arts and the faculty to make the most of it. So it was good.
I’ve been hearing the soundtrack from The Mikado since growing up in Palm Beach, and one of my English teachers there–one in a long series with whom I had difficulties–played it in class. In all of this he made an observation that has stuck with me ever since:
Probably the most profound one was in connection with Gilbert and Sullivan; in playing the highlights in class, he observed that G&S lived in a country (the UK) where you could make fun of the government and other social institutions. In other parts of Europe (like Tsarist Russia) such satire was forbidden.
To which I made the following observation:
A lot has been made about the pressure on free speech from the students. And that’s a problem. Today we have a generation that, faced with a society which changes at a blinding pace, is running scared. The last thing anyone wants to hear is someone advocating changing something else, especially when every change makes a new set of people unemployable, either temporarily or permanently.
But none of this stifling could move forward without the acquiescence of collegiate governance. And it’s often more than acquiescence; they write many of these speech codes and carve out these “safe spaces” which make free expression on campus tricky. That even applies to what gets performed on campus; one victim of our obsession with not offending anyone is The Mikado itself, which can’t be performed in many places. I should be thankful that Lee actually put it on, politically correct drivel notwithstanding.
If we allow this trend to continue, we won’t be any better off than Russia, Tsarist or Putinist. And that’s going to cost us in the long run. Without the free exchange of ideas we won’t have any ideas, which only works in a corporatist bubble. And we’ve had enough bubbles to burst the last few years to last us a lifetime.
Russia is, as I found out in my years of contact, one of those plus de change plus la même chose types of places: we have tsars, we have General Secretaries, we have Putin, but the autocracy–and the wild way Russians deal with it–doesn’t change. It is, to use their inimitable phrase, their idea, and they’re loathe to part with it, even when given the chance, as was the case in 1917 and the 1990’s.
For our part the volte-face we pulled in our last general election is breathtaking. Our wholesale rejection of respectable conventional wisdom–in a country where respectability is something of an obsession–left everyone bouche bée, not least of all the Europeans. To stick the knife in deeper, we dispatched the scion of the one group His Majesty’s government was the happiest to see the stern of their ships come back and lecture the Europeans on their lack of commitment to free speech. It didn’t help that no less of a media production than 60 Minutes put the Germans on camera saying that insulting people on social media could get you thrown in jail, this a people whose bluntness in conversation many of us find insulting on a routine basis.
When we speak of “democracy” one really begins to wonder if many of these countries ever completed their transition from “divine right” monarchies to supposedly democratic processes. Henrik Ibsen had his doubts too, which is why he wrote An Enemy of the People in supposedly paradisaical Scandinavia. The Germans have had their rough road too; their elected system went to a military dictatorship during World War I and we all know what happened next. They’ve reconstructed their country to politically bowl in very narrow lanes, which works until the ruling elite starts doing stupid things like letting in unassimilable immigrants in larger numbers than the society can absorb or shutting down nuclear plants and calling it a victory in the face of climate change when the Ukraine war cut off their Russian gas supply.
But the saddest spectacle is taking place in the United Kingdom, where the government thinks nothing of letting violent criminals out and putting dissenters into prison and prying into Apple customers’ messages and photos. The land that allowed Gilbert and Sullivan’s satire has taken a decidedly Cromwellian turn. We used to say that the United States was founded to correct some defects in the way the “rights of Englishmen” were guaranteed, and now we really know what that means.
In the midst of trying to figure out what they’re going to do about Ukraine, the Europeans need to begin by further differentiation of their own attitude towards personal freedom than those to the east of Belarus. That has to start with the “undemocratic, Procrustean experiment” called the European Union, an end run around democratic process if there ever was one.
In Rome’s last years some of its people, tired of the brutality and corruption of Late Roman rule, went to live with the barbarians or didn’t put up much of a fight. (We also have the example of Britain, which bolted in 410 when Rome couldn’t defend it any more.) Unless Europe gets is house in order and starts “reading the room” instead of locking it up, they may find the general enthusiasm for pushing back against enemies to be lacking, and then things will really get interesting.
Positive Infinity 