When Disagreement Becomes TraumaHow does one deal with those who claim that debate itself represents an agony beyond human endurance?
Jonathan Kay
08 May 2022 7 min read
On April 22nd, the University of British Columbia released its Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence Task Force report, which contains 54 recommendations aimed at confronting “systemic racism against Indigenous, Black and People of Colour (IBPOC) within the UBC community.” Though it’s two years in the making, and almost 300 pages in length, the report contains surprisingly scant evidence that UBC is a racist institution. Instead, the authors mostly indict UBC on the basis of their own “reflections of lived experiences”—an “integrative” anti-racist fact-finding method described as “truthing.”
Like the report as a whole, the supplied definition of “truthing” contained within is written in a way that makes dissent impossible: It is “the act of stating truths on subject matter considered difficult and/or dangerous knowledge, in contexts of hyper policing, surveilling, and micro-managing of racialized bodies … while simultaneously addressing power relations and injustices which actively interrogate the discomfort, denial, disavowal, erasure, and censure that accompanies truthing the subject-matter.” In other words, to refute a truthing isn’t an act of mere disagreement, but rather a symptom of the truth-denier’s bigotry and intellectual dishonesty.
* * *
Numerous Canadian institutions have published similar long-form mea culpas in recent years, all of them generally heavy on the kind of circular logic and faddish terminology contained in the UBC report (to offer a quote picked at random from page 128: “Supports of safe environments for students require evidence of significant praxis employing theoretical, empirical and critical Indigenous anti-racism praxis at the critical intersection of Indigenous women, Two-Spirit, trans, Indigi-queer, GLBTQIA, anti-colonial histories”). In all cases, what concerns me more than the actual content of this tedious propaganda is the accompanying demand that we all treat it as unfalsifiable. The whole mission of a university is based around the practice of gathering (real) evidence and evaluating it by means of observation, objective analysis, and intellectual disputation. The Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence Task Force report, on the other hand, sets out IBPOC testimonials as sacred forms of revealed truthery, without allowing the possibility (or even legitimacy) of counterargument.
This allergy to disagreement is now a growing feature of intellectual life all across Canada. At Mount Royal University in Alberta, for instance, the faculty union recently sent out two pages of detailed instructions about how professors were expected to communicate with one another at an upcoming spring retreat. In the email message, leaked to me by an exasperated faculty member, the union warned members that discussions at the retreat “may involve engaging in brave, though not entirely safe, spaces.” In order to “minimize harm,” attendees were advised to “speak from our own experience and not invalidate others’ experiences.” They were assured that moderators would eject anyone who willfully violated these rules, and comfort those who’d fled “harmful” discussions. There were also detailed instructions about how to snitch on fellow union members who’d engaged in wrongspeak—including by anonymous complaint. Taken as a whole, the document is a warning to one and all that anyone disagreeing with anyone about anything might be at risk of public shaming and official sanction.
* * *
Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/05/08/when-did-disagreement-become-trauma/
