By now, you’ve probably heard that a lecture by New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly at Brown University on “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City”, originally scheduled for yesterday, was cancelled due to audience disruption. The protestors view this as a victory, while other members of the Brown community view it as an embarrassment (the “embarrassment” side is well-represented in the Brown Herald’s comments on the story, and may even be a healthy majority).

The opposing views towards the result of the protest are a direct reflection of different political ideologies/political philosophies, not just at Brown University, but just about everywhere.

In particular, two dimensions of political ideology are useful for understanding support for yesterday’s outcome. The first is attitude towards the nature of rights, i.e. do humans possess natural rights simply by virtue of being human, or do they only have rights that have been granted by some collective entity? (or, as a possible in-between position, are some rights natural, and some rights granted?)

The second dimension concerns beliefs about the relationship between individual, groups and society. This isn’t quite as easily pulled into a true single dimension, but roughly speaking, it runs from an idea that what is most important is that there is a single collective that everyone must belong to; to the idea that smaller groups of people are most fundamental, with these groups active in creating units above and giving meaning to individuals below; to the idea that the individual is truly the entire story, with ideas like “groups” and “society” being mostly a shorthand for describing particular relationships at a given time.

Support for mob action to prevent a disapproved person from speaking on a forbidden topic has a pretty clear location according to the two dimensions above. If you believe that 1) rights are not natural but granted by a collective and that 2) membership in a collective is primary to social relations — perhaps even everything to social relations — then the step to readily accepting that those outside of your collective don’t enjoy the full range of rights granted to the insiders is easy to take.

Indeed, this fits with the speech restrictions demanded by the protestors against Ray Kelly…

[T]he format of the event as a lecture explicitly denies the forum for a conversation. The short Q&A session at the end of the event is not a true space for dialogue nor to meaningfully challenge his policies.

However, even if the event was structured as a formal debate, Kelly’s opinions have already been widely shared through national, mainstream platforms.

…i.e., before anyone brings a speaker to Brown University’s campus, they need to run it by the collective that has anointed itself as arbiter of acceptable expression, so it can approve that the format is suitable for the person speaking, and make sure that speaker hasn’t already used up the quota of free speech that the collective has allotted to him or her(!).   But really, what could possibly go wrong with a collective taking it upon itself to limit the rights of whomever they deem as an unacceptable outsider?