Academe is supposed to be a place where the free exchange of ideas can occur. But I’ve noticed an inconsistent practice. It often happens that when someone presents a paper, an audience member may respond that the ideas contained in the paper are “dangerous.” For example, a while back I gave a talk on disability studies that questioned a basic tenet of the field. During the question-and-answer period, a person raised her hand and told me that she “completely bought my argument” but that if others did too, the very foundation of the field—only recently established—might be called into question. She worried about the political consequences and was “troubled” that my ideas were “dangerous.”
This “dangerous ideas” argument has been used in a number of contexts. In the areas of feminism and postcolonial studies, for example, scholars debate whether there are universal rights that apply to all bodies. To those who believe that bodily integrity is a universal right, practices like clitoridectomies, performed in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, in which pubescent girls have their genitals cut, seem like the utmost violation and are a legitimate cause for global intervention. But to a cultural relativist who believes that Western norms should not be imposed on other cultures, that practice needs to be negotiated by sub-Saharan Africans themselves. When the advocate for universality meets the relativist, cries of “danger” fly in both directions.
In the area of race, paradoxical ideas have seemed dangerous. In the 1990s, when people began to use genetic and biological arguments to say that there was no such thing as race, that work was critiqued as dangerous by those who feared that if race was debunked, the legal protections afforded to racial groups might be weakened as well. Yet, ironically, now that people are saying that race is socially constructed and doesn’t exist as a biological fact, there are new fears from people who look at recent work in population genetics and see a “reinscribing” of race. For example, if you buy the idea that groups like Ashkenazi Jews or people of African descent carry the traits for certain diseases or even certain abilities, then you must be encouraging a rebirth of the idea of race. Both arguments suggest that it is treacherous to an established idea—in this case, that race is not biologically determined—to allow other new ideas or discoveries to emerge, even if we believe they are true. We don’t like to have our basic, shared assumptions questioned, especially when the questioners might seem to be close to the truth.
In the past, when major intellectual movements emerged—such as structuralism or deconstruction—there was a fear that these ideas would weaken our ability to make universal statements about justice, inequality, and the like. The argument was that deconstruction, for example, was dangerous because it undermined our ability to make logical claims and to take decisive political action. But as those new theories became embedded into the sedimentary layers of academic thought and culture, they did not at all hinder our ability to talk about justice and inequality.
A colleague of mine, Gerald Graff, argued in 2008, when he was president of the Modern Language Association, that we couldn’t know whether we were doing a good job as teachers without doing accurate assessments of our students. He proposed this during the tenure of Margaret Spellings as secretary of education, who had been using assessment in ways that many academics rightly feared. Graff was accused of playing into the hands of the Bush administration’s cost-cutting agenda.
George Orwell, the student of polemical language, has written about the “phrase used in political circles ... ‘playing into the hands of.’ It is a sort of charm or incantation to silence uncomfortable truths. When you are told that by saying this, that, or the other, you are playing into the hands of some sinister enemy, you know that it is your duty to shut up immediately.” Orwell decries that “duty,” and so should we.
In the case of the audience member who feared the consequences of my argument, she suggested an alternative route: a strategic approach by which we could privately agree with my dangerous insight but not go public about it. I was questioning whether the recent emphasis on diversity, which seems to solve the problem of isolating people based on outdated notions of “normality,” could include disability. I argued that disability and diversity actually did not mix.
To suggest, as the audience member did, that I should not go public with my idea strikes me as disingenuous. It smacks of an older notion of “strategic essentialism,” which did a lot of heavy lifting for 1980s feminism. The concept involved rejecting the idea that femininity was “essential"—that is, tied to the body and its physicality—but suggested retaining essentialism for political purposes. So, although in private we knew otherwise, in public we needed to act as if we were essentialists in order to hold onto various legal protections and governmental benefits already in place.
The flaw in the strategic arguments is the idea that you can permanently seal a major scholarly insight within the leaky walls of academe. Obviously the plan didn’t work in relation to gender—the word got out. Keeping ideas on the down low doesn’t work for most other issues as well. You can’t keep what you teach a secret.
One of the premises of the “dangerous ideas” model is that the person who objects can see bad consequences in the future. Another version of that is the slippery slope, in which the mischief done now will cause an avalanche of consequences. But no one can predict the future with certainty, so why would the fearful approach to new ideas be any more correct than a hopeful one? Another problem is that if the attacked idea or status quo were a strong or valid idea in the first place, it would probably not slide down the slippery slope simply by being doubted or questioned.
There is a theatrical aspect to all of this. The person who cries “danger” dresses up in the role of the defender of the helpless, poor, and oppressed against the person who is hell-bent on asserting the truth even though it means destruction. We’ve seen this scenario in mad-scientist narratives and the old story of Oedipus and Tiresias. Oedipus the King seeks to solve the riddle of the plague on his city, while the prophet Tiresias warns him to leave well enough alone because finding the truth will be perilous. Of course Oedipus’ steadfast quest for truth turns out to be beneficial to Thebes because ultimately the curse is lifted. Even though Oedipus himself was hurt by the truth, Tiresias was wrong to try to stop him.
As academics, our job is to do research, detect errors, and put forward theories. That’s what we get paid to do; that is our reason for being. To imply that certain ideas should be suppressed or played down for some tactical end is at best unprofessional and at worst unethical. We would oppose a government official’s withholding crucial information for political gain, so why should we encourage academics to do likewise?
To deem certain ideas dangerous is also grandiose. Granted, some ideas or discoveries can bring true danger to the world—for example, Arthur Jensen’s notion that intelligence might be associated with racial characteristics—but these are few and far between. What was the last scholarly idea that someone outside of academe really listened to and that affected the political, social, or physical world? Postmodernism called previous ideas of truth into question, but in so doing did not shake the world’s foundations, despite cranky critics’ claims. In any case, most new ideas simply repeat arguments and philosophical questions raised in the past. Academic battles for the most part are relatively narrow. They take place on a small turf, in front of an audience of mostly other academics, many arguing vehemently about a subspecialty’s slight tilt in one direction or another.
Most of the time, calling an idea “dangerous” seems like shooting flies with a howitzer.
By dangerous ideas I don’t mean those that are ideological or false—such as blacks are inferior, or Nazi Germany’s Aryan race was superior. I’m referring to ideas that are generally acknowledged to be true. I would make the stronger claim that there are no ideas that are both true and dangerous. False ideas are dangerous because they spread misinformation, but a true idea can never be dangerous, although its application can have dangerous consequences.
I don’t mean to split hairs, but my point is that something that is true will always add information to collective knowledge. If we believe an idea to be wrong, then we can argue against it; but if we believe it to be true, then it will always come out—we can’t suppress it.
What we can do is criminalize applications of knowledge that may be dangerous. Take for example the discovery of nuclear fission. No one can say that this knowledge should have been or could have been suppressed. Yet one of its consequences was the death of hundreds of thousands of people in Japan. To prevent such occurrences in the future, we can ban atomic bombs and criminalize the type of war that uses atomic weapons, but we cannot and should not suppress the know-how itself.
One of the long-held truths about scholarship is that it can only function well where there is academic freedom. For those who enjoy that freedom, merely labeling ideas as dangerous has a chilling effect. You don’t have to abolish tenure to impede academic freedom: A worried look combined with a concerned warning in a public setting can do quite a bit of stifling. There are many academics who relish a fight and thrive on being told their work is heretical—indeed, some have made their careers on continually producing shock effects. But many more don’t want to be accused of being dangerous, of being against various progressive causes, for example, or the status quo. For those people, the fear of being accused of being dangerous is painful and inhibiting.
I know of scholars who have played down or suppressed their own work for fear of people’s reactions. One cultural-studies scholar I know was interested in studying pedophilia. She aimed to prove that both our definitions and treatment of pedophilia were inconsistent and hard to defend. But she abandoned the plan because, since she worked at a public institution, she feared that state legislators might find out about her work and publicize it as a shocking misuse of state funds. Clearly such work might have aroused offense, but it could also have been used in positive ways. We will never know how many other scholars have similarly censored themselves.
There is a difference between producing scholarship whose application could be dangerous and actually applying that scholarship to bad ends. Two examples of how this might work can be seen in debates about human cloning and human germ-line alteration. The recent, exciting discoveries about manipulating DNA are one thing, but the applications are another. We as a global society have to decide what should and should not be done with those discoveries. The world has generally agreed, informally at least, that we shouldn’t clone a human. And most people agree that tampering with the human genome should not be allowed. Yet, it is probably inevitable that some scientist somewhere will eventually do both. That would be more than unfortunate, but we as a global society can criminalize such an activity and punish the wrongdoer. You can’t stop an idea, but you should be able to punish someone who commits a crime. Because an idea can’t be a crime, it can’t be dangerous.
When people object to an idea because it might have unpredictable consequences in the “real” world, they are actually trying to define the way that intellectuals should operate vis à vis realpolitik. They are saying that intellectuals should always consider how their ideas will function in the political world. But intellectuals are what they are because they operate in a different sphere than activists. The two can and should influence each other, but they should do that symbiotically rather than repressively. Michel Foucault, in an interview, responded to this issue by saying: “The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. ... Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, ‘This, then, is what needs to be done.’”
At base, ideas aren’t produced in response to what needs to be done; they are consequences of the free play of research, scholarship, and thought. The only dangerous idea, paradoxically, is that there are dangerous ideas.
