[Buddha-l] A letter concerning toleration

[Richard Hayes]

On Wed, 1 Jun 2005 12:41:47 -0500 (CDT)
  "Timothy C. Cahill" <tccahill at loyno.edu> wrote:

> I'm not really sure what a society of jackboots and 
> goose-steps looks like.

PBS has had some good programs on North Korea recently. 
Several tens of thousands of soldiers in jackboots 
goosestepping and shouting praises to their enlightened 
leader is not a pretty sight.

> See:
> 
> http://www.campus-watch.org/

Tim, have you encountered any of the Indian studies 
equivalents to what this web site is doing? I haven't met 
any of them face to face, but I have heard rumors about 
students "monitoring" classes about Hinduism and 
complaining when professors said things that could be 
perceived as critical of, say, the caste system. As you no 
doubt recall, a few years ago the Indology list was almost 
brought down by some contributors who objected strenuously 
to someone suggesting that the Aryans had gone into India 
and Persia from Anatolia or the steppes of Europe, rather 
than being indigenous to India and moving out. Even 
discussions about Sanskrit grammar were becoming flame 
wars.

Buddhist studies has been relatively free of attempts by 
Buddhists to control what is taught in the classroom, 
although I do recall receiving some threats in the 
mid-1990s from a Nichiren zealot who took offense at some 
thread on buddha-l. The messages arrived in my campus 
mailbox on postcards mailed from Connecticut. The messages 
were composed of letters cut out of newspapers and pasted 
on the cards. I thought it was laughable, but a couple of 
my colleagues were quite alarmed at the possible 
implications.

The very idea of academic freedom is, and long has been, 
puzzling to quite a few non-academics. I suspect that 
American society is once again living in a period when the 
freedom to say things that deviate from a particular view 
of the world (even the universe) can be taken for granted. 
NPR and PBS are both under close scrutiny by 
neo-conservatives. The gap between North Korea and the 
United States is still (thank Amitabha) enormous, but 
events in recent years suggests it may be closing, and 
there is not much comforting evidence to suggest that the 
folks over in La Casa Blanca would not like to see America 
become as repressive as any number of totalitarian regimes 
in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America have 
been.


-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico