by Michael O’Shaughnessy
Michael is a Chemistry student from Middleboro, Massachusetts, who is very passionate about science and fine arts. He is a talented musician who has played several different instruments since he was six years old. Michael also invests time in drawing and writing. He is in his Junior year, is interested in organic synthesis and pharmaceuticals, and hopes to teach chemistry one day in order to share his passion for science. Michael says that this paper was actually very important to him as he reflected on some of the challenges that he was experiencing in his life at the time. “The essay explored the necessity of ideas that challenge the status quo: something that I was faced with after leaving my hometown for school.” Michael also says that “eventually, through civil discourse with others, and a broader understanding of the world around me, I found I was more accepting of the new ideas I was being exposed to at the university.”
We live in a society where somebody’s always offended by something, regardless of your background, age, ethnicity, or social status. A lot of people attribute this trait only to younger generations, saying that we’re ‘sheltered’ and ‘overly-sensitive’, but as I said before, age isn’t a factor in how much a person takes offense. The most recent example of this would be the ‘Ok Boomer’ meme that’s been going around the internet. For some background information, for years there have been articles and comics, such as “Millennials are Killing the Diamond Industry” and comics that depict young people as ‘phone zombies,’ that blame younger generations for the world’s problems. Eventually, us young people got tired of putting up with that and responded with ‘Ok Boomer,’ referring to the intolerant and unprogressive mindset that we’ve found a lot of Baby Boomers have. As a note, ‘Ok Boomer’ is not meant to just target anyone older than Millennials, but as a way to let intolerant people know that we’re fed up with business as usual. In response to this meme, the same people writing the articles and making the comics that were attacking younger generations decided that they would play the victim, calling the word ‘Boomer’ an ageist slur. The backlash against the ‘Ok Boomer’ meme demonstrates that it’s not just my generation that is easily offended, but that older generations are just as, if not more, easily offended than we are.
This is exactly the point that Brendan O’Neill, a British columnist, makes in the speech he gives in a 2015 debate at the Oxford Union. O’Neill argues that every generation that has gone through Oxford has been faced with offensive ideas, and each person or organization presenting those ideas has lost their platform to speak. O’Neill then presses that these ideas that were once found so offensive are, in actuality, very tame by today’s standards (heliocentric planetary theory, women’s suffrage, gay rights), and that it is our civic and societal duty to be offensive. Now, it seems to me that what O’Neill means by “being offensive” is that we must actively challenge the status quo, but others could construe it as meaning that they can just say whatever they want, regardless of who will be offended by it. I would like to make clear right now that I do not subscribe to the latter definition, and when I say to be offensive, I am referring to challenging pre-established ideas, not seeking to bring harm or distress to any people or groups in society. I believe that if we stick to the definition that I am using, we can move forward and progress as a society by being what I like to call ‘civilly offensive,’ which encourages diversity of thought and the keeping of an open mind. The idea is derived from Henry David Thoreau’s ideas on Civil Disobedience and how “it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right” (Thoreau 2). This was the basis for the entire concept of civil disobedience, and to summarize, it means that if we find a law to be unjust and morally reprehensive, then it is our civic duty to break that law. And just as it is our duty to break that law, it is also our civic responsibility to push the boundaries of society with challenging or offensive ideas. This will ensure that there is a constant influx of novel ideas into our society, a concept that both O’Neill and I believe is integral to a well-functioning society.
While I can’t speak for why O’Neill believes diversity of thought is important, I can give background information on why I believe it is necessary. My train of thought comes from my background in biology and genetics. In all cases, the most important trait that contributes to the survivability of a species is that species’ genetic diversity. Without getting too much into the technical parts of it, genetic diversity is basically exactly how it sounds: a large amount of diversity in the traits of an organism encoded in its genes. And according to a video on the subject from the California Academy of Sciences, “the greater the genetic diversity, the higher the chances are that some members of the population will survive, or even flourish, in times of environmental change and challenges” (California Academy of Sciences). This same concept can be applied to the ideas that are constantly run through our society. With a greater diversity of thought, the higher the chances are of useful ideas already having been explored by the time they become necessary. Keeping in the same vein of scientific ideas, this is the whole reason why we have the scientific method. Some ideas, when put to the test, don’t make the cut, which means we have to come up with a better model to fit the things we observe in nature. The same can be said with how we interact with one another. Sometimes, other people do things that we can’t explain, and this boils down to differences in how we were raised, and we believe to be “right.”
Unfortunately, what is “right” for some people, might not be right for others, and that’s where the whole idea of being offended comes in. Fortunately for us, Thoreau himself might have an answer for us: “I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward” (Thoreau 2). In the context of his essay, Thoreau is not only pushing for you to challenge the ideas of your government and the establishment, but this quote also comes in the context of Thoreau’s discussion of protecting the rights of the minority. Thoreau wholeheartedly believed that the majority was prone to trying to silence the voices of the minority and that we, as a society, need to take measures to prevent that from happening. The best way to accomplish this is to ensure that the minority will always have a platform for speech. At the governmental level, this takes the form of the First Amendment, but that can only do so much. This needs to be taken care of on a personal level. Thoreau is pushing us to do this by being empathetic and be decent human beings above all else. He wants us to use our empathy and basic human decency as a compass for what is right and what is wrong.
This is where another problem arises: what do we do when someone appears to lack empathy or when people disagree on what basic human decency means? Fortunately, most cultures around the world seem to have come to some sort of agreement on the latter issue, even if everyone doesn’t always seem to utilize it. This comes in the form of the Golden Rule, or in other words, treat others how you want to be treated. Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I generally want to be treated as if I have basic rights, so I think that’s a good place to start. If we give everyone the right to have their voice heard, regardless of who they are and what others think of it, then everything should be fine right? Well, that already exists in the form of the First Amendment, but there still seems to be an issue. That’s because the First Amendment doesn’t tell people how to think, just what they can or can’t do in the eyes of the law. We, as a people, need to come together and keep our minds open to ideas that counter our own. This is the only way that we can progress as a society, by tolerating and accepting that we have no control over what other people think.
The greatest periods of change in our society are able to happen when there are ideas that contradict the status quo, but these changes could progress a lot more smoothly if we just listened to each other. One of the most prominent examples of this in recent history was the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in which the ideas of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr were the prominent, but contrasting, ideologies of the movement. Malcolm X’s ideologies were largely based around hate, “criticizing most of the civil rights movement as well as its use of nonviolent civil disobedience. He advocated the use of more aggressive techniques, which he asserted were justified self-defense in response to institutionalized violence by white society against blacks” (Stolberg). While Malcolm X’s methods were effective in bringing attention to the civil rights movement and furthering Malcolm X’s own agenda, they didn’t push forward the agenda of the movement itself as white people were afraid of the Black Panthers and if one group is living in fear of another, they cannot live in harmony. Near the end of his life, Malcolm X, a Muslim, made a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he realized that his violent ways of protest were wrong, renounced his old ideologies, and converted to Martin Luther King Jr’s civil rights ideologies.
These ideologies were largely based on the movement that liberated India from British rule, led by Gandhi. King once wrote “virtually all revolutions had been based on hope and hate. The hope was expressed in the rising expectation of freedom and justice. What was new about Mahatma Gandhi’s movement in India was that he mounted a revolution on hope and love, hope and non-violence” (Butler-Bowdon). King realized that even if the civil rights movement achieved its goals through violence, then it would be harder to get the support of people of different races and it would be nearly impossible for people to live in harmony afterwards because there would always be some leftover resentment from both groups. The only way forward is if we actually took the time to listen to each other and work through society’s problems together. It’s a slow process, but we’re getting there, and it’ll go a lot faster if we got everyone on board with it too. Imagine if everyone just took the time to actually understand where someone else is coming from instead of just saying ‘what you’re suggesting is offensive to me’ and ignoring it and moving on with their lives.
It’s not easy to do this, but since when is anything easy worth doing? Since I started college and moved away from my very conservative, 96% white hometown, I’ve had almost a complete one hundred and eighty degree shift away from who I was in high school. I’ve achieved this because even though I was relatively close-minded politically, there were still some cracks in my ‘armor’ that allowed new ideas to get through. This came in the form of my innate desire to become friends with lots of people and my interest in their stories. Through the people that I listened to and some of my classes as well, I discovered that most of the assumptions that I had based my political ideas on were false, and this led to a gradual shift away from conservativism for me. This shift was so gradual that I didn’t even notice it myself until one of my friends from high school pointed it out to me when I visited him last April.
None of these changes that occurred in my life would have been able to take place if I hadn’t kept some parts of my mind open to others’ ideas. The same can be said for the civil rights movement and almost every major societal change: if there wasn’t anyone with an open enough mind to listen to the voices of others, then the entirety of the movement would’ve had no platform. This is why it is imperative that we, as a society, keep our minds open to new ideas and new ways of thinking. This is the only way that those with ideas that challenge the status quo can be heard and the only way that we can ensure that a constant diversity of thought flows through our society is by keeping our minds open, listening to the people around us, and by constantly challenging what we see represented in the status quo.
Works Cited
“Brendan O’Neill | Freedom of Speech and Right to Offend | Proposition.” YouTube, Oxford Union, 25 Aug. 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtWrljX9HRA.
“Genes and Biodiversity.” YouTube, California Academy of Sciences, 30 Dec. 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOxsjdB4-ZQ.
Stolberg, Victor B. “Malcolm X.” The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Wilbur R. Miller. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2012. 1062-1063. SAGE Knowledge. Web. 4 Dec. 2019.
“The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998).” 50 Classics Series: 50 Politics Classics, Tom Butler-Bowdon, Nicholas Brealey, 1st edition, 2017. Credo Reference,
Thoreau, Henry David, and Ebrary, Inc. Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech, 2001. Web.