The Pig is Dead: Parrhesia and the Common Good

One of the most durable claims of the scholar is the right to say whatever he or she wishes under any and all circumstances. If scholarship is to advance, if freedom of inquiry is to be upheld, if the pursuit of knowledge is to be unimpeded by aging orthodoxies—so we are told—it is necessary to speak up, speak out, refute the graybeards, shake the foundations of the scholarly establishment. To do anything less, to allow any consideration to constrain our frank criticism of apparent error, is to betray the cause of truth. The arguments are familiar: progress in any enterprise demands contrarian positions, and contrarian positions demand attacks on old ways of thinking. One's opponents must be shown decisively to be wrong in their methods and conclusions. Each new generation of scholars is thought to build on the ruins of the old. And the instrument of destruction, the means by which error is exposed and new truths or paths established, is unhindered speech: open criticism of those who have gone wrong and frank criticism of their work. Speaking freely without regard to consequences is considered not only a right but the closest that scholarship comes to a duty.

The result of unbridled criticism, offered by a host of scholars representing a variety of persuasions, is only what one would expect. Academic discourse, especially over the last several decades, has reached untold levels of incivility and polarization in perhaps every subject across the disciplines. Scholars labor to show that opposing positions are not only wrong but wrongheaded. As a result, graduate students often find that they are not only schooled in the higher discourse of a subject but also indoctrinated into the Byzantine intricacies of disciplinary feuds and factions—forced to take positions in disputes that they as yet tenuously understand. If they survive their training, they find themselves still under pressure and being graded. So-called peer review has in many cases become a system whereby groups in authority stay in authority (until inevitably they are superannuated or ousted). Book reviews are often less an assessment of the contents of a work than a judgment, often humiliating in its wording, on the work's adherence to a point of view and methodology to which the reviewer or the reviewer's school subscribes. The idea that scholars are fellow workers engaged in a common pursuit is said to belong to a gentlemanly past well behind us.

The state of academic feuding may be less deadly than that between the Hatfields and McCoys, but at least something tangible existed at the center of the feud between mountain families: the ownership of a pig. Academic feuds generally are powered by the intemperate attacks that we expect, often require, and in many cases enjoy and reward. These attacks are presumed to serve innovation in scholarship but tend to reinforce rather than undermine existing orthodoxies. An interesting and original hypothesis can be less important to a peer reviewer than a book or paper's general stance and conformity to established method. In feuds that extend (as many do) for longer than a decade or two, the participants become more involved in fabricating and burning straw men than in carrying on the argument as it originally developed. They forget what the fight was about in the first place. The pig is dead.

An ironic counterpoint to the acrimonious debate between and within disciplines is the varied phenomena that tend to go under the name of "political correctness." The idea behind political correctness, a term now used primarily as a device of invective, is that certain words, certain questions, even certain fields of inquiry, are inherently offensive and should be avoided. Although this proposition may appear to be essentially a call for civility—a call not to offend others gratuitously—it is more often in itself a means to stigmatize opponents, not by argument but by making counterargument impossible. This discourse, focusing on the proper use of speech, is both academic and political—which is hardly surprising since the ideal of free speaking among scholars is traditionally parallel to...