Reserve Bank of India Chief Raghuram Rajan (former University of Chicago economist) offered a brilliant defense of intellectual freedom and curiosity in a recent speech:
“So what does an
educational institution or a nation need to do to keep the idea factory open?
The first essential is to foster competition in the market place for ideas.
This means encouraging challenge to all authority and tradition, even while
acknowledging that the only way of dismissing any view is through empirical
tests. What this rules out is anyone imposing a particular view or ideology
because of their power. Instead, all ideas should be scrutinized critically, no
matter whether they originate domestically or abroad, whether they have matured
over thousands of years or a few minutes, whether they come from an untutored
student or a world-famous professor….
Protection, not of
specific ideas and traditions, but the right to question and challenge, the
right to behave differently so long as it does not hurt others seriously. In
this protection lies societal self-interest, for it is by encouraging the
challenge of innovative rebels that society develops, that it gets the ideas
that propel Solow’s total factor productivity growth….
Actions that
physically harm anyone, or show verbal contempt for a particular group so that
they damage the group’s participation in the marketplace for ideas, should
certainly not be allowed. For example, sexual harassment, whether physical or
verbal, has no place in society. At the same time, groups should not be looking
for slights any and everywhere, so that too much is seen as offensive; the
theory of confirmation bias in psychology suggests that once one starts looking
for insults, one can find them everywhere, even in the most innocuous
statements. Indeed, if what you do offends me but does not harm me otherwise,
there should be a very high bar for prohibiting your act. After all, any ban,
and certainly any vigilante acts to enforce it, may offend you as much, or
more, than the offense to me. Excessive political correctness stifles progress
as much as excessive license and disrespect.”