[Image connected to Daily Mail article here]
Everyone has seen the clip from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in which NY Republican Rep Elise Stefanik deftly corners three prestigious university presidents into revealing their ambivalence toward not just garden-variety antisemitic rhetoric, but to genocidally antisemitic rhetoric. It's an instant classic in which smart and powerful folks feel so trapped by the easy moral "yes" they could have unequivocally offered on a question of whether calls for genocide constitute bullying or harassment that the only escape hatch they see under the light of scrutiny is "it depends on context". As if calling for genocide is somehow not inherently a call to violence.
Harvard President Claudine Gay's testimony is not technically inaccurate that Harvard's recently revised anti-bullying and anti-harassment policies and procedures don't operationalize a way to address even strong speech calling for violence, unless it's directed at an individual by an individual. As if a group chant somehow absolves each of the group's members of their personal accountability for engaging in harassing speech. As if a targeted group doesn't deserve protection from calls to violence against them unless those calls single out one member of the group for specific violence. While I'm sure some of the most lauded legal minds from Harvard's prestigious law school contributed to the drafting of these policies, this glaring loophole seems to have escaped them: that consequences for calls to harm anyone based on race, ethnicity, religion, or other protected categories can be avoided as long as those calls are calls to harm them all.
Despite her nearly immediate apology in which she wished she had had the "presence of mind" to steer away from the policy and procedure context of the hearing session back to her "guiding truth" that antisemitic threats "have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged", Gay knows she is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Student sentiment reflexively and unreflectingly joins loudly with activist faculty in whipping up angry mob fervor against ideologically convenient targets based on vague definitions, propagandized accusations of oppression, and spillover between distinct categories of analysis. But a significant portion of alumni in the donor class won't tolerate what they see as unambiguous hate speech. Harvard's donor bench is deep enough that threats to pull funding over offenses are largely toothless, so her apology can hardly be read as a response to the realpolitik as was fellow House Committee session invitee and U Penn president Liz McGill's resignation, but I'm sure Board pressure and pressure from the Jewish community and allies contributed to the apology Harvard did get.
Underlying both Gay's testimony and her apology are questions of context which she claims to be attentive to, but she consistently demonstrates that she doesn't understand the very conceptual framework of.
In any interpretive endeavor, linguistic and extra-linguistic frames and footings are at play, and the hermeneutic task consists in establishing from among them the salient features that allow for intended meanings to be clear. To be fair, interpreters also have the leeway of discerning unintended meanings, there is a range of participants in a communicative act that make some intentions more salient than others, and there are also certainly many intentionally hidden intents among even salient participants. And also, to be fair, the words themselves get in the way--it's nearly impossible to fully express oneself, even on simple propositions. However, it's broadly true that when people communicate, they understand themselves to be agents, acting in consistency with an identity, having a purpose for speaking, and trusting that their selection of words within the shared code of language transparently conveys their clear intended meaning to their target interlocutors. They are doing something--sending a message. They are choosing a cooperative stance with the interpreters of that message--speaking in a form they hope the other will not mistake. They are speaking in function of their understanding of the communicative frame--the flow of topics and themes, what the "talk" is about is something they're engaged in or engaged in altering. And they are speaking in function of a role they understand themselves to be taking up--explaining things puts you in the temporary role of an expert or witness, saying " I'll do it" commits you in the role of effort-maker, and asking a question makes your role that of elicitor of a response, whether out of genuine curiosity or imperious need to establish truth, and implies that you'll soon pass the turn to your interlocutor and listen. In all this, speakers are each differently aware and are playful with their place in various categories of interacting contexts--pragmatic, syntactic, semantic, broadly social, narrowly interpersonal, and more. This discursive field precedes and escapes their full control, but they all participate at all levels of analysis on the continuing evolution of that field's shape, some with more control than others, some despite themselves.
If the idea of context can refer to all of this impossibly complex discursive field, then the term itself is effectively an empty signifier, meaning whatever one wants it to mean, and nothing useful, let alone concrete. Using it that way has advantages--one of which Gay and the other college presidents defaulted to when cornered: an escape from moral judgment. All they have to do is claim "context dependence" and they are absolved of the responsibility to think through general standards of behavior, and the concomitant need to insist on sufficiently rigid, concrete, and operational definitions underlying the standards by appealing to the impossibility of cataloguing all possible instances in which behaviors may arise.
But if, on the other hand, "context" is a meaningful term with a constructive purpose between cooperative interlocutors, there has to be some selection made between the various levels of analysis, and a principle of centrality by which a rational choice can be made between what's really pertinent to what's really at stake and what's extraneous. When cooperating to achieve mutual understanding, communicative participants often dance with reframing, but it's also generally understood between them what's core and what's peripheral. How do they do this among all the complexities? It's not actually that hard, it turns out. All you need is a method to organize your interpretive assumptions. You start with the surface, and move to the broader and deeper. You start with the intention and move to the reception. You start assuming purpose, and measure success at achieving it by the purpose's own standards.
Analytical philosopher W.V. Quine's problems of indeterminacy in meaning making are undone as soon as this principle of purposive context enters. He relates a fictional situation where a rabbit crests a hill as a linguist and a native speaker whose language the linguist is just learning look on. The native speaker points and utters a new word, which the linguist notes as meaning "rabbit". Technically, that assumption is premature--the native speaker may have meant "supper" (as in that's what I'm going to hunt for dinner), or "hop" (because that's how rabbits move), or "ears" (because that's a distinguishing feature of rabbits). But as soon as you remember that there's a pre-negotiated and cooperative frame of purpose surrounding both the linguist's presence and the speaker's utterance--that they are both there to achieve mutual clarity--all the weird hypotheses about what it could mean flake away, and you're left with the only one that answers the purpose: teaching the basics requires building on fundamentals, so we can expect that the native speaker will begin with naming, and only later move to putting nouns and verbs together.
In the same way, protesters who chant racist and genocidal slogans have a purpose--and it's not even close to ambiguous: to express hatred, outrage, and whip up popular mobs against their targeted group. What that whipping up produces is inherently dangerous to anyone connected with the target, because mobs have a psychology all their own that often escapes each individual's normal rational baseline of moral restraint. This is why capitol police were right to fear violence on January 6th 2021 even though Trump clearly called for peaceful protest, not vandalism or worse criminality. It's also why Pelosi's even more condemnable for refusing the police presence buildup that was recommended that day. There's a limit to the comparison, of course, but if the Left wants to claim insurrection on this standard, then veiled calls to genocide from their own side isn't merely political speech, isn't merely and tightly focused on Israel as a state, but at Jews as an identity category.
So let's go through it methodically. On the surface lexical level, does genocide mean something? Yes, it objectively means the eradication of a people--all individuals so identified if the attackers get their way. Pretty violent, menacing, unwelcoming stuff. On the deeper level, does a genocidal chant against a people imply reasoned, principled opposition to political or ideological positions? Not in any sense, except possibly as the most extreme Nazi-esque hyperbole. If we go as broadly historical as we want, there is wiggle room for the uninformed to entertain wildly incorrect opinions about the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza--all of which also fail the test of conceptual and contextual rigor--but to flesh ideological opposition out in words with a genocidal chant against Jews as an identity group also has an effect that corresponds so much more directly to the surface meaning and purpose of the protests, that methinks they do protest too much. Moving on, our analytical method calls for scrutiny of intent and reception/impact. It's clear that genocidal chants by masses are intended both as signals to the powerful in support of genocidal policies and also as intimidating shows of force to the targeted groups among them that potentially action-inspiring hatred is ubiquitous and unopposed by authorities whose duty it would normally be to protect against such threats and harassment. The reception, as testimony from Jewish witnesses and community members showed, was successfully induced feelings of intimidation, unwelcomeness, and lack of physical safety. And keep in mind that we're saying "feelings" here not because they're mere emotions, but because we are rationally using the closest available vocabulary to describe impending potentials for harm that haven't yet completely materialized. This is not the same "feeling" as someone who takes offense when none was intended.
And let's contrast that clear result of methodical contextual study of Harvard's anti-harrassment policies and Gay's congressional testimony thereon. The purpose of the 20+ page policy document is stated in a lengthy preamble so clearly as to be inescapably clear: "Harvard University is committed to cultivating a community that is open, welcoming, and inclusive, and that supports all community members in pursuit of the University’s mission of learning, teaching, research, and discovery." Would any rational human conclude that genocidal chants targeting groups present in the community serve or impede that open, welcoming, and inclusive kind of supportive community cohesion surrounding such a lofty mission? This is not to equate every offended feeling with the right to shut the offender's mouth, but rather to acknowledge that while offenses are in the eye of the beholder, there are objective interpretations of meaning in context available by which we can judge purposes without the relativism of invalidating the testimony of the affected, and implying that it's the job of the victim to be tougher. Gay's pivot to the procedural portion of the policy--complaining that even objectively offensive speech doesn't have an operational definition allowing Harvard to pursue justice against it unless it becomes individually spouted and individually targeted--is all the more condemnable because it completely ignores the core, clear context of what purpose those procedures are nested in. Especially because I suspect she is doing so strategically and cynically: she knows the purpose is entirely overthrown by genocidal chants, but the she's part of the mob itself seeking intimidation and can't admit its clear immorality without throwing her own ideological fellows under the proverbial bus.
It's broadly true that the principle of free speech requires all of us to steel ourselves against vile insults because the same condition of possibility that enables us to communicate love, peace, intelligence, and cooperation enables another to communicate their opposites. And it's even more important to keep centralized authorities from defining for those they govern what constitutes and what does not constitute punishable political expression--because crossing that line almost guarantees rampant and frequent political imprisonment. But the correct response of those in power to the abuse of rights and liberties is righteous use of their own more powerful voice and influence to stop evil, not to throw up their hands and absolve themselves of the responsibility to confront it, even if under the guise that people are free to speak. When individuals don't exercise their duty to refrain from evil speaking, the kicker is that they actually limit their freedom--they move away from the internal love and peace that forms the source of all liberty, and get absorbed in anger, temptations to act on anger, and eventually, the consequences of their acts. Some may successfully forestall those consequences, but eventually all will account for deeds, words, and even idle thoughts. But inevitably, and usually long before that final judgment, freedom simply is not found in the gall of bitterness. And I'll be looking in the future for the evidence that Gay's assertion was not insincere--that all who threaten (note also the careful wording sleight of hand--threaten is narrower in meaning than harassment or unwelcome, anti-inclusive, or even genocidal chants) Jews will be held to account by Harvard. But I'm not holding my breath.
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