MCLC: Why Haven't You Been Banned Yet (3)

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Why Haven’t You Been Banned Yet (3)
When I distinguished between social pressure and political/legal pressure, it was not to deny that "social pressure is pressure" and can be harmful, but to affirm a functional difference between the two phenomena. No one knows this difference better than a disfavored minority.  If the members of such a minority can count on constitutional government to protect their persons and their livelihoods, then they can endure: as vertebrates, we are equipped to resist social pressure if we choose to do so. If the rights to free speech and association are protected as well, the minority can oppose that pressure peacefully.  But if the state's officers give rein to the resentments of the majority or, worse, if they wield the law in a self-interested way without accountability, armoring the privileges of the elite, then those with a different view may find themselves in dire straits: vulnerable to overwhelming power, isolated, and without recourse.
When I object to the implication of an equivalence between such pressures in restraint of speech as may be found in two countries, it is not out of pride in the U.S., but out of concern for China. Constitutional government is China's hope.  There are, granted, innumerable problems that constitutional government will not solve.  It isn't meant to solve them.  It is meant to preserve a space of imagination and debate that no one can shut down -- a space in which people will be free to solve their own problems if they have the will and the wisdom. The citizen of the West who relativizes or belittles this freedom (for any of a hundred rationales on offer in the academy) has thrown a pearl away richer than all his tribe.
Here I should correct Prof. Manfredi's courteous misapprehension: I am not a professor.  But with the approach of the holidays I would like to raise a glass to a former professor who has written eloquently and labored bravely on behalf of constitutional government: Xu Zhiyong.
A. E. Clark <aec at raggedbanner.com>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on December 22, 2015
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center  
To stop receiving these emails, click here.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20151222/ff97f9df/attachment.html>