In the January edition of the New Yorker, there was a story (“The Hit List”) about the so-called “Islamist war” on secular bloggers in Bagladesh. It begins with the murder of blogger Avijit Roy: atheist, rationalist and advocate of scientific understanding. (Roy: “The vaccine against religion is to build up a scientific approach.”) It is a truly terrifying read for any blogger, myself included. In my own discipline of professional Philosophy, there has been much discussion recently about the risks involved in doing digital or “public” philosophy, motivated in large part by the racist threats philosopher George Yancy received after publishing a piece in the NYT’s The Stone (an op-ed section dedicated to philosophy) entitled “Dear White America.” Anyone who has ever expressed an unpopular opinion in public (or anyone who has ever read Plato’s Apology) knows that ideas can be dangerous. As Sarah Vowell wrote (in one of the best opening lines to a nonfiction text ever): The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. And by dangerous I don’t mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed.
It’s still early in the semester for me right now and, because I teach my classes (for the most part) historically, I’ve been teaching Aristotle this week. One of the things I’ve always loved about teaching Aristotle’s account of character-development is his emphasis on the necessity of habituation and phronesis in the cultivation of virtue. My go-to example in class is always the virtue of Courage, which I find particularly useful for illustrating the fact that if one is not given cause or the conditions for developing a certain virtue– in the case of Courage, if one is never really at risk or in danger— then one cannot cultivate that virtue. I often say to my students that I do not consider myself “courageous,” because I am not at risk or in danger frequently enough to develop the habit of being courageous. “Probably none of you are, either,” I also tend to say, though (given the student demographic at my institution) I suspect that statement is more aspirational than it is descriptively accurate.
Does it matter?
Last summer, a close friend and colleague of mine (who is black, female, and an academic) was targeted and viciously harassed in a coordinated assault by conservative websites (and the individual troll-minions of those sites). Some of that harassment took the form of unambiguous threats of personal, physical and sexual assault. There is no doubt in my mind that it is a bona fide “risk” for black women to express their views in public, not only on the Internet but anywhere at all.