Do I Have a Surprise for You

Moliere had a character in a play who was terribly surprised to learn that he'd been speaking prose all his life.
Today Trump told democratically elected, native born Congresspeople to go back to their "own countries. Like Obama who he insisted had to have been born in Kenya, these women just happen to all have brown skin. There's a pattern here and guess what? If you support that, like Moliere's character surprised to learn he was speaking prose, you might be surprised to learn that you're racist.

The Silly Debate About Bannon and Free Speech and the Two Reasons That the First Amendment is So Vital

As I write this there is a bit of a furor over the fact that Steve Bannon was invited to an ideas festival hosted by the New Yorker and then disinvited, prompting a flurry of pieces like this one in the New York Times by Bret Stephens.

"The only security of all is in a free press."
- Thomas Jefferson

Steve Bannon is a white nationalist. He believes that white superiority and national economies are nonfiction. There are people who think that he deserves an audience for his tried - and spectacularly disproven - ideas. Some of these people argue that this is a free speech issue.

At some point in the evolution of science, astronomers presumably stopped inviting "scientists" who argued that the earth was at the center of the universe. Like white nationalists, geocentrists had been proven wrong and no longer deserved a hearing.

Free speech doesn't mean that any curator of content like the New Yorker owes you their audience. I wish that were the case because I would sue every major news outlet and conference host (as would every person with a set of ideas they were trying to get out into the world).

There are two reasons for the first amendment that guarantees the right to free speech, assembly, religion, and press, what is essentially freedom of thought and expression.

The first is simply because it is such a vital part of the human experience to hold beliefs and to express those. This is reason enough for the first amendment but there is more.

The second is that a community with freedom of thought and expression will make more progress. If you espouse a really dumb idea, I can refute it with a better idea. As I stand there smug and proud, another person can come along with an idea even better than mine. And as they accept their accolades for such insight and intelligence, another person comes along with an idea that refutes theirs. And so it goes in a parade of progress that all depends on people freely having ideas, sharing ideas, and refuting or refining ideas to evolve a worldview that lets them better deal with reality. The ultimate test of their ideas is whether these ideas enable them to travel across the ocean or sky or space, conquer diseases that once conquered them, feel happy and know how to make others happy, and do other things like create energy or knowledge. The first amendment is not meant as a tool for protecting old ideas but as a tool for creating new ideas that we can act on in new ways.

The real power of the first amendment is that the evolution of ideas drives progress. This evolution is driven by the free expression and exchange of ideas and animated by beliefs we're passionate about.

Old ideas like white nationalism that destroyed a country as great as Germany and resulted in 100 million deaths do not deserve a second chance or a new audience. We already know it doesn't work. The first amendment doesn't mean that it has a right to an audience. Properly understood, the first amendment means that it deserves to be discarded as we move on to something more practical and intelligent.

Alabama, Race and Education

This is Section 256 in Alabama's state constitution:

Duty of legislature to establish and maintain public school system; apportionment of public school fund; separate schools for white and colored children.

The legislature shall establish, organize, and maintain a liberal system of public schools throughout the state for the benefit of the children thereof between the ages of seven and twenty-one years. The public school fund shall be apportioned to the several counties in proportion to the number of school children of school age therein, and shall be so apportioned to the schools in the districts or townships in the counties as to provide, as nearly as practicable, school terms of equal duration in such school districts or townships. Separate schools shall be provided for white and colored children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race. 

In 2004, the state legislature defeated a constitutional amendment that would have struck down Section 256 from Alabama's constitution.

For those of you trying to process what seems unbelievable, I'll spell it out. Federal law prohibits segregation in American schools; Alabama's state constitution still mandates it.

Across the nation, Alabama's school system is 2nd worst and Trump's odds of winning are 2nd best. That might be just a coincidence.

Central Europe's Disturbing Intolerance

It seems a truism that inland regions are less tolerant. People who live on coasts around ports have been continually exposed to a variety of skin colors, religious persuasions, cultures, and lifestyles. Fewer people come through Nebraska than New York or San Francisco; fewer people come through Serbia than England. Insularity seems to make people intolerant rather than curious.

Which brings us to Switzerland's stunning vote to ban "the construction of minarets, the towers that typically stand adjacent to mosques and serve to issue the Muslim call to prayer."

The Swiss speak four languages and would seem a model of diversity, but it is also worth remembering that it wasn't until 1971 that they granted women the right to vote. These are not progressives.

So I guess one ought not to be surprised that the Swiss felt threatened by the construction of Muslim edifices. Muslims, of course, make up nearly 4% of their population and are obviously a threat to the country's laws and mores.

It seems to me, though, that the Swiss have got it backwards. Rather than ban the construction of minarets, they should insist that every Muslim household build one atop their domicile, making it easy for anyone else to see where they are. And once they've done that, I see no reason why they couldn't require Muslims to wear tattoos on their forearms.

If they want to borrow from the playbook of religious intolerance, Central Europe has plenty of examples to draw from. If they are heading down that path, they should know better than to ban the symbols of religious difference that could, instead, be used to identify minorities.