I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have
been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast
majority of them want to learn. But true to stereotype, I increasingly find
that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their
appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by
elite culture and their undergraduate professors.
They cannot
learn until their minds are freed from that prison. This year in
my Foundations of Law course for first-year law students, I found my
students especially impervious to the ancient wisdom of foundational texts,
such as Plato’s Crito and the Code of Hammurabi. Many of them were quick to
dismiss unfamiliar ideas as “classist” and “racist,” and thus unable to engage
with those ideas on the merits. So, a couple of weeks into the semester, I
decided to lay down some ground rules. I gave them these rules just before
beginning our annual unit on legal reasoning.
Here is the speech I gave them.
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Before I can teach you how to reason, I must first teach you how
to rid yourself of unreason. For many of you have not yet been educated. You
have been dis-educated. To put it bluntly, you have been indoctrinated. Before
you learn how to think you must first learn how to stop unthinking.
Reasoning requires you to understand truth claims, even truth
claims that you think are false or bad or just icky. Most of you have been
taught to label things with various “isms” which prevent you from understanding
claims you find uncomfortable or difficult.
Reasoning requires correct judgment. Judgment involves making
distinctions, discriminating. Most of you have been taught how to avoid
critical, evaluative judgments by appealing to simplistic terms such as
“diversity” and “equality.”
Reasoning requires you to understand the difference between true
and false. And reasoning requires coherence and logic. Most of you have been
taught to embrace incoherence and illogic. You have learned to associate truth
with your subjective feelings, which are neither true nor false but only yours,
and which are constantly changeful.
We will have to pull out all of the weeds in your mind as we come
across them. Unfortunately, your mind is full of weeds, and this will be a very
painful experience. But it is strictly necessary if anything useful, good, and
fruitful is to be planted in your head.
There is no formula for this. Each of you has different weeds, and
so we will need to take this on the case-by-case basis. But there are a few
weeds that infect nearly all of your brains. So I am going to pull them out
now.
First, except when describing an ideology, you are not to use a
word that ends in “ism.” Communism, socialism, Nazism, and capitalism are
established concepts in history and the social sciences, and those terms can
often be used fruitfully to gain knowledge and promote understanding.
“Classism,” “sexism,” “materialism,” “cisgenderism,” and (yes) even racism are
generally not used as meaningful or productive terms, at least as you have been
taught to use them. Most of the time, they do not promote understanding.
In fact,
“isms” prevent you from learning. You have been taught to slap an “ism” on
things that you do not understand, or that make you feel uncomfortable, or that
make you uncomfortable because you do not understand them. But slapping a label
on the box without first opening the box and examining its contents is a form
of cheating. Worse, it prevents you from discovering the treasures hidden
inside the box. For example, when we discussed the Code of Hammurabi, some of
you wanted to slap labels on what you read which enabled you to convince
yourself that you had nothing to learn from ancient Babylonians. But when we
peeled off the labels and looked carefully inside the box, we discovered
several surprising truths. In fact, we discovered that Hammurabi still has a
lot to teach us today.
One of the falsehoods that has been stuffed into your brain and
pounded into place is that moral knowledge progresses inevitably, such that
later generations are morally and intellectually superior to earlier
generations, and that the older the source the more morally suspect that source
is. There is a term for that. It is called chronological snobbery. Or, to use a
term that you might understand more easily, “ageism.”
Second, you have been taught to resort to two moral values above
all others, diversity and equality. These are important values if properly
understood. But the way most of you have been taught to understand them makes
you irrational, unreasoning. For you have been taught that we must have as much
diversity as possible and that equality means that everyone must be made equal.
But equal simply means the same. To say that 2+2 equals 4 is to say that 2+2 is
numerically the same as four. And diversity simply means difference. So when
you say that we should have diversity and equality you are saying we should
have difference and sameness. That is incoherent, by itself. Two things cannot
be different and the same at the same time in the same way.
Furthermore, diversity and equality are not the most important
values. In fact, neither diversity nor equality is valuable at all in its own
right. Some diversity is bad. For example, if slavery is inherently wrong, as I
suspect we all think it is, then a diversity of views about the morality of
slavery is worse than complete agreement that slavery is wrong.
Similarly, equality is not to be desired for its own sake. Nobody
is equal in all respects. We are all different, which is to say that we are all
not the same, which is to say that we are unequal in many ways. And that is generally
a good thing. But it is not always a good thing (see the previous remarks about
diversity).
Related to
this: You do you not know what the word “fair” means. It does not just mean
equality. Nor does it mean something you do not like. For now, you will have to
take my word for this. But we will examine fairness from time to time
throughout this semester.
Third, you
should not bother to tell us how you feel about a topic. Tell us what you think about
it. If you can’t think yet, that’s O.K.. Tell us what Aristotle thinks, or
Hammurabi thinks, or H.L.A. Hart thinks. Borrow opinions from those whose
opinions are worth considering. As Aristotle teaches us in the reading for
today, men and women who are enslaved to the passions, who never rise above
their animal natures by practicing the virtues, do not have worthwhile
opinions. Only the person who exercises practical reason and attains practical
wisdom knows how first to live his life, then to order his household, and
finally, when he is sufficiently wise and mature, to venture opinions on how to
bring order to the political community.
One of my goals for you this semester is that each of you will
encounter at least one idea that you find disagreeable and that you will
achieve genuine disagreement with that idea. I need to explain what I mean by
that because many of you have never been taught how to disagree.
Disagreement is not expressing one’s disapproval of something or
expressing that something makes you feel bad or icky. To really disagree with
someone’s idea or opinion, you must first understand that idea or opinion. When
Socrates tells you that a good life is better than a life in exile you can
neither agree nor disagree with that claim without first understanding what he
means by “good life” and why he thinks running away from Athens would be
unjust. Similarly, if someone expresses a view about abortion, and you do not
first take the time to understand what the view is and why the person thinks
the view is true, then you cannot disagree with the view, much less reason with
that person. You might take offense. You might feel bad that someone holds that
view. But you are not reasoning unless you are engaging the merits of the
argument, just as Socrates engaged with Crito’s argument that he should flee from
Athens.
So, here are three ground rules for the rest of the semester.
1. The only “ism” I ever want to come out your mouth
is a syllogism. If I catch you using an “ism” or its analogous “ist” — racist,
classist, etc. — then you will not be permitted to continue speaking until you
have first identified which “ism” you are guilty of at that very moment. You
are not allowed to fault others for being biased or privileged until you have
first identified and examined your own biases and privileges.
2. If I catch you this semester using the words “fair,”
“diversity,” or “equality,” or a variation on those terms, and you do not stop
immediately to explain what you mean, you will lose your privilege to express
any further opinions in class until you first demonstrate that you understand
three things about the view that you are criticizing.
3. If you ever begin a statement with the words “I feel,”
before continuing you must cluck like a chicken or make some other suitable
animal sound.
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To their credit, the students received the speech well. And so far
this semester, only two students have been required to cluck like chickens.
Adam J. MacLeod is an associate
professor of law at Jones School of Law at Faulkner University in Montgomery,
Alabama.
