The Future of Honest Questioning

The ability to question and the very act of questioning is fundamental to the humanistic life stance. But there are pitfalls for those daring to ask questions in today’s world. Ric Esther Bienstock’s recent essay in the Opinion section of the Saturday Globe and Mail ago expressed her concern: “Self-censorship has become the safest form of expression.” [see attachment below – the Globe and Mail is behind a paywall]

As Bienstock states, “a generation [is] being taught that disagreement is harm.” Further, university students and professors she spoke to told her that “they had abandoned certain lines of inquiry altogether fearing professional or social consequences.” As she says, “when honest questions get reframed as instruments of oppression, something essential is lost: the ability to disagree.”

“Universities exist to teach people how to think, not what to think. When we tell a generation that ‘disagreement is violence’, that ‘discomfort is harm’, that ‘the correct response to an idea you find threatening is to make sure nobody else hears it’, we don’t protect them. We weaken them.” “…once we decide that some ideas are too dangerous to hear, we have already conceded the argument to the people who would silence us.”

One of the key aspects of this problem is the lazy way of thinking known as binary reasoning. This either-or approach often leads to flawed, oversimplified, and judgmental conclusions and decision making. In binary thinking, there is no room for nuance or accommodation of detail. Things are either black or white.

Most decision making includes consideration of more than one variable (or should). Critical thinking helps us deal with and evaluate the importance of these variables.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking

It is perhaps useful to consider the analysis of this situation in the university context.

In 2014, President Robert J Zimmer and Provost Eric D Isaacs at the University of Chicago appointed The Committee on Freedom of Expression to draft a statement “articulating the University’s overarching commitment to free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation among all members of the University’s community.”

https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/reports/FOECommitteeReport.pdf

They stated that “…education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think. Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom.”

“But it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”

So back to the concerns expressed by Bienstock in her essay.

Questions:

1. What are the implications for modern society?

2. What role if any do colonialism and racism play in determining what questioning is respectable, particularly in an educational setting?

3. How do today’s humanists need to proceed to defend the right to challenge the assumptions and conventions of Canadians? Of anyone?

See you there!  Bring a questioning friend.
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