By Manuel Buron
Being as we are – dancing to the deranged of presidential advisers and court sentences, I mean – in Spain a strange controversy went unnoticed. A professor at the University of Texas is preparing, as every year, to teach. Among the mandatory readings of his subject includes – who can think of it? – the Plato Banquet, one of the most beautiful texts of antiquity.
As there they are also a little unhinged, the university calls the professor to order. What had happened? This institution, in the heat of a Trumpism, had adopted a new regulation by which all supposed allusion to “ideology of gender or race” was vetoed.
Someone, at some point, must have opened the text of Plato and, of course, found everything from a wide and carefree variety of sexual preferences to the recommendation to love the boys at the top of their beauty, that is, the moment the mustache bozo begins to leave.
In short: Plato was woke. Canceled. Censored. And the thing does not cease to have a certain grace because it was Plato who has bequeathed to us the most resounding defense of censorship, with the famous expulsion of the poets of his Republic; and including the Homer himself, for, Plato tells us, “a man must not be honored more than the truth.”
Oh, the truth… so, Truth is called Trump’s Twitter. And there is no tyranny that, in the name of truth, tolerance, equality, morality or any other unappealable reason, does not yet continue today trying to expel the poets of the republic.
Fight for ideas
From Plato to Trump there are about 2,500 years, which is studied by Jacob Mchangama, a Danish essayist who has been dedicated to the issue for years, in an essential book, enjoyable and also urgent, Freedom of expression. A global story from Socrates to social media (published by Ladera Norte).
Mchangama traces the cruel and fascinating thread of the struggle for ideas, not for any particular idea, but for the power to express them, which is the precondition and condition of all the others. It would be difficult to find a better example of what Norbert Elias called the “process of civilization”, because there was nothing more human than wanting our ideas and beliefs to succeed, the defense of freedom of expression puts us in the uncomfortable situation of doing exactly the opposite: to defend others from expressing ideas contrary to ours, and that although these seem terrible to us.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).