Howard Jacobson-16/07/2007

Howard Jacobson, (Independent)

"You don't silence other voices if you're a scholar, that's where I stand. You don't, if you're a thinker and a teacher, remove from the unending conversation of the mind those of whom you happen, rightly or wrongly, to disapprove.

I won't rehearse the arguments here. I had my say some weeks ago in this newspaper. In response to what I wrote, a boycotter popped up on some blog explaining that I'd got it wrong. Those in favour of excommunication weren't removing Israeli voices in the sense of gagging or silencing them, they were simply refusing to listen to them. A distinction that was lost on me at first, but with time grew clearer and more shocking. For "not listening" is, if anything, more philosophically brutal than silencing or gagging. Brutal, in especial, to the person not doing the listening. That act of intellectual violence which, if you are a boycotter, you are presently preparing against the Israeli academy, is in fact an act of violence against yourself.

To say you intend knowingly and purposefully and on principle "not to listen" is to say you are waging a sort of war on your own faculties, because listening, if you are a reasoning person, is chief among the tools you reason with.

Most of what Socrates did was listen. No longer to listen is no longer to engage in the dialogue of thought. Which disqualifies you as a scholar and a teacher, for what sort of example to his pupils is a teacher who covers truth's ears and buries it under stone. A university that will not listen does far more intellectual damage to itself than to the university it has stopped listening to."

 

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