Time To Play Jazz
Street violence was reported in Berkeley last night. Riot police, students and tear gas is never a good combination. The cancelled speaker is an editor for the Breitbart News Network, which was headed until recently by a senior Trump advisor. “So now it begins,” I thought upon waking to this news report. A drumbeat of violent words will always lead to blood in the streets. To speak is to act; words are performative. No constitution, no doctrine of “free speech” can save us from the monster within if we are inclined to let that hidden demon loose. One might as well attempt to hold back the tides of the sea. UC Berkeley unrest
THE STRAIGHT LINE IS GODLESS AND IMMORAL
–Freidensreich Hundertwasser, Architect & artist, 1928 – 2000
The logic freaks have had it their way for over 2000 years and all they have to offer now is more of the same: more technology, more rationality, more surveillance, more consumption, more control.
No more marches, let’s play jazz. The only way to turn back a straight line is with a curve.
2 thoughts on “Time To Play Jazz”
No!!! Excess logic is not the problem here; indeed, only an application of logic might offer an effective counterattack.
Berkley students sought to protest that the vile Milo Yiannopoulos was to speak. Rioting was their mindless emotional reaction to the provocation, the most direct “straight line” reaction they could have gone to.
If instead someone had thought over the problem rationally, the reasoning might have proceeded thusly:
What does the speaker hope to gain by addressing Berkley? Attention; respect as someone important; to be regarded as dangerous due to his inflammatory ideas.
Rioting demonstrates that the students regard Yiannopoulos exactly as he WANTS to be perceived: as a powerful threat who merits close attention.
Hot emotion led to rioting. Cold rationality could have led to denying Yiannopoulos a confirmation of his power, if instead he had been allowed to speak but no one showed up to hear him. Or if folks had attended the lecture, but stood and turned their backs on him together.
If the audience had begun laughing at his words uproariously and continuously, rather than reacting angrily, THAT would have been the curve to turn back a straight line. They would have deployed the most potent weapon possible against him — ridicule. He would have been held up to the world not as a looming terror, but as a foul-minded pipsqueak. But mobs don’t think so strategically.
Logic is a useful, indispensable tool, but over rated. At the ground level of our biological being is emotion, the reaction to the organism to its environment. Students felt the visceral threat posed by this speaker. Sadly the extreme nature of the threat resulted in a panic. Nevertheless the threat was and is real. The first amendments grants the right of speech, but not the right to be heard. Your point is well taken.