As unacceptable racist and anti-Semitic posters have crept onto campus and into our streets recently, not only at the University of Victoria but across the country, I am reminded of a pillar of our faculty’s mission statement, to “engage myriad voices.” But how to engage such voices?
I’m struck by the increasing despondency about the apparent (in)effectiveness of critique and argument to bring about change, leaving people struggling to understand how to respond to violence and hatred. We are floundering in the space between the need to protect freedom of speech and the need to protect life and dignity.
Amid scattergun accusations, “fake news” and “false facts,” one casualty of the past year has been the public perception of the integrity of knowledge, undermining not only trust in the content of debates but also in the principle of reasoned debate itself. In this context, the fabric of democracy and modernity is fraying and people are falling (or jumping) through the gaps.
At times like this, universities have the responsibility to act, to speak, to stand, to intervene. Some are endeavouring to do so, including our own UVic. Yet the liberal academy in general seems so shocked by events and by the apparent ineffectiveness of its condemnations that it risks appearing to have lapsed into whingeing: “Why will nobody listen to me?”
This situation reminds me of Stacey Title’s film from 1995, The Last Supper, which is about a group of complacent, self-congratulatory graduate students who recognize evil in the world and endeavour to make it a better, more tolerant place.
The film revolves around a series of dinners, to which the friends invite a sequence of guests (whose intolerant opinions they find increasingly offensive) to see whether their collective education and intellect can change such people for the better, while feeding them. The conceit, presumably, is that the friends are nourishing their interlocutors, mind and body; they engage myriad voices.
Before long, the friends begins to debate whether argument is enough or whether tolerant “liberal positions” are always doomed to be ineffective in society because liberals (as they identify themselves) “just talk,” but “never act.” They convince themselves that tolerance is a species of non-commitment, that it disables action, where “action,” it turns out, means violence.
As a result, their set-piece dinners unravel into a cascade of decreasingly nourishing and decreasingly sincere engagements, becoming merely excuses to murder their guests for holding views that the friends find offensively intolerant. Then they bury their victims (including their own tolerance and their faith in the transformative power of reason) in the garden and plant tomatoes on them. Is this also engagement with myriad voices?
Their moral dilemma pivots around a classic graduate-school party-piece: Had you met Hitler while he was still an aspiring art student in Vienna in 1906, should you have killed him? Perhaps ironically, these self-professed “liberal” students quickly settle on the conclusion that killing him would have been both justified and actually good, and it is not until the end of the film that we encounter an apparently far-right ideologue who points out to the friends that the terms of the question are false, that “action” need not mean violence or murder, but can also mean engagement and argument.
This provocateur agrees that it is wrong to do nothing when encountering evil, but argues that the best outcome is not murdering Hitler in 1906; the best outcome would be the transformation of Hitler into somebody else, somebody better, through reason and enlightenment. The liberal students find themselves persuaded out of violence and back into reason by the icon of their hatred; engaged by myriad voices.
None of this is terribly deep or profound, but The Last Supper provokes us into engaging with moral decay and the vortex-like contagion of cycles of violence that seem to destroy our faith in reason and in debate as action. Challenging these issues reveals how our confidence in the power of reasoned argument is itself a form of faith, constantly tested in the face of apparent failures. What do we do when confronted with systemic failure? How can we avoid slipping into violence when reason seems to fail? Is there a line at which the failure of reason demands other forms of engagement?
When we find ourselves in imperfect or broken systems or societies (as we do now, and always will), we constantly strive to find modes of engagement that manoeuvre between reason and violence, between rightness, righteousness and effectiveness. So, there is no simple response to an offensive poster or other act of violence; neither inviting the culprit to dinner nor burying them under the tomatoes is a solution.
Modelling effective engagement is one of the great challenges of social responsibility for the liberal university today.
Chris Goto-Jones is dean of Humanities at the University of Victoria.
