Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Two friends, Petra and Rodrigo, are having an argument.
Petra thinks the world is best if people stay in their lane and do their job as best they can, narrowly construed. CEOs should try to maximize profits within the law. Emergency-room doctors should do their best to save the life of every patient. Lawyers should represent every client to the utmost of their ability. Scholars should publish their findings as accurately as possible. And parking-meter attendants should write citations without regard for who is getting them.
Rodrigo thinks the world is best if everyone is not only doing their job, but taking a broader view in an attempt to improve society. CEOs should feel a social responsibility to donate some corporate profits to good causes. Emergency-room doctors should triage in a way that treats shooting victims before shooting perpetrators. Lawyers should try less hard when their clients are morally odious. Scholars should withhold findings that cut against social justice. And parking-meter attendants should give a break to,say, the shift worker who always refills her meter but is regularly five minutes late because at her job, she must clock in and out on the hour.
Which approach do you agree with? Or if, like most of us, you have no universally consistent answer, how do you want people to decide whether to apply Petra’s approach or Rodrigo’s approach?
When should institutions or the people within them do their particular job as best they can, construing them narrowly, and when should they instead try to better the world through their job?
Send your responses to [email protected] or simply reply to this email.
Conversations of Note
If I policed parking meters, I would give that shift worker a break.
Among college administrators, I have long thought that Petra’s approach is extremely underrated, something I was reminded of while watching college presidents respond to recent news events.
To illustrate the point, here’s a sort of email that almost no college president ever sends, but that I regard as ideal (setting aside valid concerns about consistency with regard to administrators who spent years commenting on every little thing yet stayed silent when Israel was attacked by Hamas):
Dear students and faculty,
As events in Israel and Gaza dominate the news, I am refraining from any official comment on the substance of matters, despite following them closely, because no matter how strong my views are on any subject as a scholar or a person, it is inappropriate to marshal my power and influence as president of this institution to overshadow the voices of individual faculty or individual students. My job is to help you to discover, improve, and disseminate knowledge––not by pronouncing on what is true, but by conserving an environment where you can seek truth.
Such environments are never more important, and never more threatened, than at times of conflict or upheaval, when fashions, passions, and pressures tend to impinge on freedom of inquiry.
To guard against that threat, I am taking the following steps:
1. Any administrator who acts to suppress, punish, or chill speech protected by the First Amendment, thereby violating the civil rights of students or faculty members, will be terminated with cause. Any student who infringes on the free-speech rights of classmates will be suspended.
2. Together with the board of trustees, which I have already consulted on this matter, I hereby reaffirm our unanimous and enthusiastic support for academic freedom.
3. Everyone’s physical safety is sacrosanct. Campus security is on alert against even threats of violence, which will not be tolerated from anyone inside or outside the university community.
4. Wherever one stands on Israel, the Palestinian people, and related conflicts, it is useful to be more informed about history, geography, politics, all parties involved, the full complexity of their beliefs, and more. Though I am a longtime student of the Middle East, I doubt there is a department in this institution that couldn’t teach me something about it. But that knowledge and the subject-area experts who possess it are dispersed and difficult for almost all of you to identify, let alone access. So my office is creating an online resource where relevant scholarship from our faculty will be featured. And I am sponsoring a related lecture series. In-person attendance will be limited to students, but all lectures will be recorded, transcribed, fact-checked, and released via podcast for public consumption.
5. I hereby announce the president’s $100,000 prize for modeling constructive public discourse across substantive disagreement on a matter of widespread contestation. Any faculty member is eligible to enter by organizing any campus event that is advertised, attended by 10 or more students, and posted online. The first prize will be given by an independent, ideologically diverse jury next semester and must be on the subject of Israel and Palestine. Future prizes will be given each semester with no subject restriction.
6. Cognizant of statements at other institutions that anticipate faculty or students so traumatized by geopolitical events that they are unable to excel as learners or teachers or scholars, I want to emphasize my contrasting position: that everyone here possesses the resilience to carry on, knowing just how important the work that we do here is.
7. I am confident in your capacity for resilience partly because our institution has invested in teachers and other helpers to assist anyone who needs help summoning it or building it up anew. Several of the bravest people I have known at this institution have made use of those resources. They include residential and academic advisers, department heads, doctors, psychologists, and more––indeed, they are so varied that navigating them can be tricky, so I’ve created a new resource to make things easier. Going forward, text my office, anonymously if you wish, and a person I trust will direct you to the best helper for you.
This institution is blessed with extraordinary resources: a talented faculty, an endowment that exceeds the wealth of some nations, a campus more lavish than many cities, a multimillion-dollar library, and staffers dedicated to taking care of your needs––your meals, your medical care, your recreation, and more––so that you may better focus on our vital mission. With those privileges comes the responsibility to diligently engage in truth-seeking. If you honor that obligation but find yourself confronting obstacles, let me know how I can help to eliminate them.
Sincerely,
President X
P.S. Be good to one another.
Deaths Abroad, Mourning Next Door
So many people are suffering the loss of loved ones due to faraway events, whether violent conflicts or natural disasters, in the Middle East or elsewhere. I’m so sorry if you’re among them.
Former Representative Justin Amash, the child of Palestinian and Syrian parents and one of the most principled lawmakers I’ve ever covered, announced the deaths of some of his family members on Twitter:
In this video, provided to me by a relative on site, you can see the destruction at Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church in Gaza. The ancient sanctuary remains standing, but the church annex, which includes offices and meeting spaces for the Christian community, collapsed from an Israeli airstrike, killing multiple members of three connected Orthodox Christian families, who are my relatives. They are my dad’s first cousins and their spouses, children, and in-laws. May their memories be eternal.
This is my second cousin George being pulled from the rubble at Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church in Gaza. This beautiful baby committed no crimes, harmed no person. May his memory be eternal.
… Please remember the thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians, in unbearable circumstances, who simply want a life of peace. So many of the people suffering are just children. They don’t deserve violence and death.
In The New York Times, the author Dara Horn argues that diaspora Jews are having a hard time right now.
As was true in ancient times, the ties between global Jewish communities and Israel are concrete, specific, intimate and personal. My New Jersey Jewish Federation has institutional ties with the southern Israeli town of Ofakim and its surrounding communities, sharing annual home stays with a place whose death toll from the attacks already exceeds that of the notorious Kishinev pogrom of 1903, in which 49 Jews were murdered. Millions of American Jews, not to mention Jews in Britain, France, Australia and elsewhere, have friends and relatives in Israel. Even if Hamas hadn’t made it clear that they see all Jews as targets, our connection is personal and all too real.
We spent days desperately scrolling to learn who among our acquaintances was dead, maimed or captive, connecting American hostages’ families with State Department contacts, attending panic-stricken online briefings and pooling resources and supplies for victims — all while fighting obtuse official statements from our own towns, schools, companies and universities that refused to mention the words “Israel” or “Jews” in referring to the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, lest some antisemite take offense at the existence of either.
We have tried to get our children off social media, shielding them from images of the violence. We’ve held mass fasts, recited psalms and sung ancient prayers for the rescue of captives. And as we gather by the thousands despite our many contradictory opinions and despite the extra security required for our gatherings even here, we have returned to the words of our ancestors that have carried us through thousands of years: Be strong and courageous. Choose life.
Provocation of the Week
In The Hedgehog Review, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn makes a broad case against what she calls “pastlessness”:
Fantasies of freeing ourselves of the baggage of the past run aground on the fact that humans are history-bearing animals. Since we are beings in time, history includes lives being lived as well as lives lost, with all of their expressions, their constructions, and their communications. The loss of human beings is a personal and social loss, but it is also a historical loss. The killing and destruction of war is the ultimate abuse of history. Even in war, chances for ultimate survival, if not victory, reside in our sources of meaning and the traditions and practices that embody them. Only from these can new life hope to spring forth. Our traditions and practices alone allow us, if given that chance, to rebuild.
But war is only the most obvious assault on the past. We have seen how so many today desire to live without history, even in times of relative peace. The Cult of the New ravages in manifold ways, reducing hard-won works to rubble. Creative destruction—or disruption, to use the Silicon Valley buzzword—has been the governing mantra for so long that it is hard to retrieve memories of an alternative. To live without traditions of moral grounding is to cut ourselves off not only from the past but from the future. If we proclaim ourselves masters of the universe, abolish the demarcation between the self and other people and the world we live in—everything outside the self—and between what happened before and what is yet to happen, we might liberate ourselves. But we would also obliterate reality in the process.
Are the stakes of history really so high? After all, the exploration of the past, especially in its academic and professional forms, might seem like a leisurely pursuit. Students learn to select a topic that has not been done—lacuna is a favorite term—as though idly just trying to finalize the details of a corner of the canvas. It seems as though we have all the time in the world to fill in the parts of the past whose vivid details are not already engraved on our minds. A quick look at the world of higher education would lead one to believe that at least many university administrators think that history is, at best, an optional pursuit. Schools shrink history faculties and offerings, along with those of adjacent fields that hold the very record of our humanity, and the past is sidelined for present political or financial pursuits.
But we would be better off seeing history as a matter of urgent need. We should recognize the cultivation of a historical disposition that combines stewardship and moral inquiry as one of our most pressing endeavors, after feeding, clothing, and sheltering ourselves, precisely because it is a necessity if we are to succeed in all of the endeavors of this life. In the best of times, history is a mad race to grasp what we can before the evidence crumbles. In the worst, it is a matter of cultural survival. In more ways than one, we find ourselves today in a historical emergency.
That’s it for today—see you next week.
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