On scholarly silence in the face of atrocities

First of all, I want to get one thing straight. Anyone who tweets on issues of public importance more than I do is a mere activist and Not A Real Scholar, while anyone who does so less than me is a conservative square who is a Servant of Empire. 

Now that we've got that out of the way, we can get to the substance of this post. In my narrow corner of the world, there has been a lot of discussion about the extent to which scholars should involve themselves in ongoing polarizing events, especially on social media. 

I want to start with a confession and a concession. First, the confession. Since roughly 2019 or so, I've taken a step back from Twitter due to the tremendous amount of abuse I experienced on there for my opinions on South Asian domestic and international politics. People often say "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." Well, I did. In other words, if someone does not want to comment on Israel-Palestine because they don't want to deal with the headache of 400,000 people in their mentions calling them names, I understand that one hundred percent. No problem whatsoever. 

Second, the concession. We cannot make assumptions about why any one individual is not commenting on something like Israel-Palestine in real time. 



I endorse this position wholeheartedly. If someone is calling their senator or donating money behind closed doors, it will appear from the outside that they are "saying and doing nothing" but in fact they are doing something arguably more important than tweeting. 

All that said, if we zoom out from specific individuals and look at things in the aggregate, it will not escape you that people who have otherwise no problem tweeting with great emotion and clarity regarding Trump or their kids' weekend baseball game or the latest album by Kendrick Lamar have gone very quiet. Again, one individual can have good reasons. But if an entire group of people have suddenly discovered the value of discretion and silence, you do begin to wonder what's going on. 



Like I said, there's good reasons for being silent. But there's bad reasons too. These include:

1. Powerful people in my field should not know what I think, because if they do, they will not like me and I will have less success in my career.

Reason this is bad: when people with tenure -- and not just tenure, but tenure at the elitest of the elite universities in the country and the planet -- start worrying about who they're offending and making uncomfortable, it's not a good look. The Middle East is not my area. But I do recall something very similar happening in the aftermath of events in Kashmir in August 2019. It was extremely disappointing. 

If someone is untenured and keeping their mouth shut, I totally get it -- though as one historian told me in grad school, "if you stay silent before tenure, you will be silent after tenure." But still, fine. Academia can be a really crazy business. The currency of success is basically (1) reviews of your work (i.e. what other people think of you) and (2) letters of recommendation (i.e. what other people think of you). One wrong sentence or word or interaction can come back to bite you and ruin your career and life five years later, all without you actually knowing what happened or even who it was that screwed you. So if you want to be safe rather than sorry, ok, no problem. 

But the funny thing is, in my experience, untenured folks are more likely to call out bad actors doing bad things than those with the protections of tenure. In the Middle East space (again, not my area), I've been super impressed with people like Dana El Kurd or Diana Greenwald in the last week, neither of whom I know IRL, both of whom have hit (in my humble opinion) the exact right tone you want to hit in these circumstances. 

But academics -- for all their wokeness when it is costless, for all their "let's decolonize our syllabus" exhortations in faculty meetings, for all their radicalism from the perch of a panel at the Palmer House with 7 people in attendance -- are a small-c conservative lot. They (we?) are afraid. Keep your head down. Maintain good relations with as many people as possible. You never know when you will need a fellowship or a book contract. 

2. I am a scholar, above the fray, and will not get pulled into the detritus of actual, real politics, unlike you dirty plebs. 

For example:


(Scholar to scholar, I have a great deal of sympathy for Gabriel, who I don't know IRL, for the reaction to this tweet. I've been there before and it can really mess with your head. But if I could be so bold as to give a pro-tip after the fact: if you're going to be silent, just be silent. Don't break your silence for the express purpose of telling people you're being heroically silent.)

Reason this is bad: Imagine an epidemiologist saying in March 2020 "I will not be tweeting about Coronavirus. Twitter is not a peer-reviewed journal. I am a scientist, which means I do science, dammit, not public relations or polemics." You'd laugh, right?  

This drive for objectivity, I think it comes from a good place. Gabriel's opinion above is shared by many people I know. You identify as a scholar, and therefore, maintaining a distance from the hoi polloi is part of the enterprise. You don't want to be seen as too close to "one side" in a two-sided dispute. Remember APSA's hilarious and tone-deaf and just plain silly statement after the Trumpistas insurrection? That too was a produce of this impulse.

 


Here's the issue: if your drive for scholarly objectivity is coloring your ability to look at a powerful nuclear-armed state -- one militarily and economically and diplomatically backed by the world's most powerful state -- leveling apartment blocks and conducting ethnic cleansing demographic engineering against a stateless and rights-less group for literally decades, you are no longer in the realm of objectivity. You are an agent of oppression, perhaps unwittingly or unintentionally, but still. You end up being so concerned with your scholarly credibility that you have forgotten basic humanity. 

"Activist" is a dirty word in academia, and honestly, I can see why. In the interests of full disclosure, there have been many times when I have turned up my nose at someone and thought "this person is not a real scholar." But at the same time, I think it's important to remember that for 99% of academics, 99% of their peer-reviewed work will be forgotten by the time they are dead, if not way earlier. Some perspective about our role as "scientists" is in order. Don't take yourself so seriously and don't forget the bigger picture. 

3. Twitter is just an outrage machine, what good will come from me, one random scholar, tweeting about this global crisis?

Reason this is bad: Yeah okay, so right when Israel starts pummeling Palestinians is when you discover your epistemic humility? Lol just lol. I would have a lot more sympathy for this argument if it were forwarded by people who are similarly quiet on everything else. Indeed many are, and I have no problem with those folks, because at least they're consistent. But if you have 36365365 tweets about "kids in cages" and zero about this -- yeah, you're not fooling anyone. Well, you're not fooling me anyway. 

Comments

  1. arohanMay 15, 2021 at 1:50 PM

    What exactly are you trying to say? Any academician who doesn't support Hamas openly is dishonest?

    ReplyDelete

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