Forget Freedom; or, Thinking about Harm and Harm-less-ness with the Buddha

Let’s face it: there is no point in continuing to rehearse our usual liberal slogans about freedom—whether academic freedom or freedom of expression, two freedoms that are not the same but are closely related and often regarded as manifesting the same foundational values¹—to address the student protests on our college campuses over Palestine-Israel.² The sacrosanctity of freedom when it comes to speech—the idea that freedom is the highest possible value and that freedom must be restricted in only the rarest and most exceptional cases—is by now an empty cliché, a superstitious mantra invoked to cast a spell on knowledge workers as well as citizens at large, to get us all to bend the knee to a Euro-American liberal tradition.³

This Euro-American liberal tradition, which has long since run its course, is, I expect, familiar to members of the MLA. My comments in this article, critical of this tradition and suggesting  an alternative, are broadly applicable. I also believe my comments are especially pertinent in Profession, given both the MLA’s prominent status as an academic organization that has a direct stake in the campus protests and, in the light of this stake, MLA leadership’s recent action to not advance a proposed resolution relating to the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, or BDS, campaign (see “Message from the Executive Council”).⁴ BDS is a call put out by Palestinian civil society. Since 2005, the BDS campaign has called on individuals and organizations around the world to boycott Israeli institutions for their complicity in (at best) or active support for (at worst) the Israeli state’s brutal occupation of Palestinian land and settler-colonial violence against Palestinians. The alternative to the liberal tradition I offer is ahimsa, which is sometimes translated as nonviolence, but better rendered as harm-less-ness, or the active diminishment of harm in all its forms, as I clarify below. The BDS call has become more urgent since the launch of the genocidal Israeli (and, frankly, we must now say, US) attack on Gaza in 2023 and later, and in many ways is a forceful illustration of my argument about ahimsa.⁵

Typical of the liberal Euro-American tradition, John Stuart Mill declared in the nineteenth century, in On Liberty, “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind” (87). Most MLA members are familiar with—and may share—such sentiments. Two centuries later, despite ample evidence regarding the inadequacy of such thinking, we remain deeply mired in this style of thought when it comes to matters of speech and academic conduct. There are many reasons why such thinking is inadequate, but a chief one is that it sets out to be neutral regarding content—this type of thinking claims to not care what the content of an opinion is but rather simply to uphold the right to articulate an opinion. This content-free approach has failed woefully. Despite this failure, we find it difficult to imagine alternative ways of thinking, even though the need to do so is ever clearer.

It is, then, long past time to examine a new opinion, thought, and expression regarding the academy and academic organizations—to explore new strategies to deal with the challenges of research, instruction, and academic governance that face us. In 2022, I published an essay in Cultural Critique in which I tried to do so; I wrote “The Ruse of Freedom: Ahimsa and Freedom of Expression in a Comparative Context” because, in comparing how debates about freedom of expression unfold in India and the United States, it became evident to me that current progressive movements in the two countries, while sharing many ethical and political values, often head in opposite directions on the issue of freedom of expression. In India, progressive movements generally aspire to protect the rights of scholars, writers, and intellectuals to speak freely in the face of attacks from Hindu fundamentalists; in the United States, on the other hand, the First Amendment right to freedom of expression has increasingly been weaponized by fundamentalists as a powerful shield for hate speech, making the matter much more complicated. In India, the writer Perumal Murugan and the filmmaker Anand Patwardhan have had to take recourse to legal and other protections to make sure their works can circulate in the world. In the United States, however, First Amendment rights have increasingly been claimed by right-wing media figures like Charles Murray and Ann Coulter to intimidate and silence progressive voices. In other words, the transnational comparative exercise of writing “The Ruse of Freedom” impressed on me, as the title implies, that freedom—as in academic freedom as well as freedom of expression—cannot be treated as an unalloyed good if we are interested in meaningful politics beyond hate and prejudice.

Add to this assessment the undeniable fact that freedom of expression and academic freedom have always been selectively available to few: often the rich, the connected, and the institutionally privileged, such as tenured faculty members (though, increasingly, tenure is hardly a guarantee for these freedoms). Pro-Palestine and Black Lives Matter activists have never had the same freedom of expression that proponents of Zionism and liberal racism do in the contemporary United States.⁶ The spring and summer of 2024 provided ample evidence of the selective application of freedom of expression surrounding the protests over Gaza. The presence of doxing trucks—the purpose of which is to expose, in a dangerous fashion, the identities of students who are critical of Israel and Zionism—have been protected as freedom of expression (see, e.g., Hudson). Aggressive Zionist counterprotesters (I speak from personal experience at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa) have been permitted to crash a teach-in on Palestine, under the guise of freedom of expression. Meanwhile, peaceful campus protest encampments—also a form of expression, surely—have been broken up, often violently, by not just campus enforcement but the police, who have also stood by as counterprotestors engage in violence (as at the University of California, Los Angeles; see, e.g., Kelley). Anti-Zionist students who engage in protests have been assaulted and disciplined with arrests, as at Columbia University, for example (see “Campus Crackdown”) and have been maligned in sections of the media—and even in the legislative chambers in Washington, DC, and many state capitals. Clearly, the goal of the recourse to liberal proceduralism—in which disruptive counterprotesters and doxing trucks are protected but encampments are not—is the selective preservation of freedom. The same partisan selectiveness is visible in the proliferation of anti-BDS laws and in the recent decision-making of the MLA, which betrays a readiness to bow to the threat imposed by these laws with regard to BDS, despite arguments that the laws are unconstitutional.⁷

So, it is time to ask: What is the value of this freedom, which is selectively applied—marshaled, even—to punish and abuse rather than to protect and empower? Is there a better set of principles that can guide us as educators in these times? Is there a value beyond freedom that can get us closer to the goals we desire?

Rather than the notion of freedom, I propose we reorient our thinking about academic conduct and speech—indeed, education itself—around ahimsa, or harm-less-ness. I locate this invocation of ahimsa in neo-Buddhism, a theoretical formation represented most powerfully by the great Dalit intellectual and leader B. R. Ambedkar, especially in his final work, The Buddha and His Dhamma, published posthumously (see esp. 345–47, 506–09). Ambedkar, who famously said, “I was born a Hindu but will not die one,” converted to Buddhism a few months before his death in 1956.⁸ Ambedkar is often called a neo-Buddhist in recognition of the novel ways in which he interpreted the teachings of the Buddha, which he studied for most of his life.

Ahimsa has been commonly associated with Gandhi; I turn to Ambedkar’s worldly and materialist neo-Buddhism rather than the transcendental Gandhian tradition to understand ahimsa because the Ambedkarite notion provides the greatest support to explain ahimsa as harm-less-ness (rather than as nonviolence). Ambedkar is no anomaly in his turn to Buddhism for radical inspiration. Buddhism has, through the centuries, provided a robust framework for the propagation of heterodox and antihierarchical values in India, the land of Buddhism’s origin. Ahimsa, understood within this tradition, I propose, is the term for a paramount value of harm-less-ness—that is, not just nonviolence but the radical preserving from harm of all beings, from the human self to the most other of nonhuman beings. Among other motives, my invitation to turn to Ambedkarite neo-Buddhist thinking is meant to challenge the (neo)colonial notion that foundational theoretical, philosophical, and ethical values for modern societies can only be Euro-American. In a sense, this essay responds to the injunction to decolonize theory.

What does all this have to do with academic freedom, freedom of expression, the tumult on our campuses, and the MLA? Within the context of this neo-Buddhist tradition of ahimsa, of harm-less-ness, the reverence for freedom of expression appears wrong-headed—an abstract and purely notional value that is not able to guarantee an ethical (harm-less) outcome. Doxing of students solely because of their support for Palestine is protected, as is much Islamophobic or anti-Semitic hate speech. Calls for the genocide of Jews, then, fall under the protection of the law, as the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shockingly struggled to explain to Congress in December 2023, to the utter befuddlement of the public at large. In contrast, I suggest, ahimsa foregrounds—right away, and without apology—what we should care about (indeed, what we profess already to care about): harm-less-ness. Furthermore, properly understood, ahimsa preserves the valuable aspects within freedom of expression and academic freedom—the self-actualizing, healing, and community-building aspects of these freedoms—while excluding the aspects that allow these ideas to be claimed for detrimental ends.

The way that we think about freedom of expression and academic freedom today in liberal Western societies derives from the larger, even more inviolable value of freedom in general—freedom of the individual, that is. Notionally (only notionally because, in practice, the right is applied highly selectively) the individual’s right to speak freely is constrained only in rare exceptions. Regardless of the content of a speech act, liberal Western thought upholds our right to engage in the act. This extreme reverence for speaking freely is grounded in the idea of a monadic individual whose unfettering is the great goal. This is not to suggest that the liberal argument does not believe in good ends; it does, of course, profess them. However, instead of looking for the good in the content of the speech act, the liberal argument assigns this good to the act itself.

As history has shown, there is much wishful thinking in this liberal approach. Mill, for example, relies on the vigorous adversarial public contestation of ideas, good and bad, unleashed by this indiscriminate upholding of freedom of expression to winnow out the bad and dangerous ideas and allow the good and harmonious ideas to succeed. Indeed, Mill’s essay represents a leap of faith: that it is only through this vigorous and public debate, regardless of what might break, that the good will emerge. Also apparent in this way of thinking might be the utilitarian notion that the ends justify the means—that a little hate speech, racism, sexism, and religious bigotry are acceptable as the means of finding more perfect knowledge on which to base our more free societies. Two centuries after Mill (and two centuries after the general triumph of this liberal approach to freedom of expression as a foundational concept), we can safely regard this thinking as naïve at best, and disingenuous at worst. After all, the free and vigorous debates in Mill’s time did not stop Britain from pursuing a brutal empire across the world. And nearly two centuries later, free and vigorous debates around racist claims that Barack Obama was not born in the United States did not prevent the purveyor of these claims, Donald Trump, from being elected president. Clearly, bad and dangerous ideas don’t always lose in free and vigorous debates. Such debates can be like oxygen to the fire of malice, as Trump’s reelection to a second term shows. These debates simply help bad actors burn down things of value that generations of humans built—that generations of humans sacrificed to build—with effort and care.

In contrast, an ahimsic approach to expressive acts does not value freedom over harm, or the act itself over the content of the act. Indeed, an ahimsic approach reverses the hierarchy of values in liberal thinking on freedom of expression. Such an approach places ahimsa, or harm-less-ness, over freedom, and the content of an act over the right simply to act. This approach does not require one to reject freedom; freedom is contained within ahimsa, for, after all, unfreedom is surely a species of harm. However, freedom in ahimsic thought is not an abstract value based on a notional monadic individual, inattentive to what we might today call intersectional identities. Instead of an abstraction, freedom must be understood in properly contextualized ways.

Ahimsa’s orientation toward harm-less-ness, then, provides us with a framework through which to assess how and when to proscribe speech acts. Proper guidelines for when to deem speech acts unacceptable are necessary, and guidelines for how to do so are also important. Ahimsa, as understood within a neo-Buddhist framework, provides these guidelines, but in a way that does not exempt the need for self-scrutiny, for the prohibition of a speech act for being ahimsic must, itself, be ahimsic.

We can go further: if ahimsa proscribes and prohibits, the concept also exhorts and enables. The value of harm-less-ness is not to be understood solely in the negative, as a prohibition on the emergence of new harm. An ahimsic community should also seek to eliminate already existing harm (such as the horrors currently being visited upon Gaza by Israel and the United States). This would require, in fact, the protection of speech; for, through speech, among other things, harm is contested. Thus, when it comes to speech, ahimsa requires us to protect speech acts that pursue ahimsic goals (such as a BDS resolution that responds to the devastation in Gaza). Unlike liberal freedom-of-expression philosophy, such protection would be based on the content of the speech act, where content is understood not just as the meaning of the words spoken but also as those words’ effects in relation to the world—that is, the context from which the words emerge and into which they enter.

At its root, an invocation of neo-Buddhist values of ahimsa in the context of debates about academic freedom and freedom of expression is an attempt to shift the anchor of these debates away from freedom and toward harm-less-ness. The time for such a shift is ripe. After all, the desire for this shift is expressed in debates when commentators ask, despairingly, why freedom should be upheld if doing so simply creates the conditions for hate. Even Mill was forced to recognize the harm that can emerge from speech, though he did so reluctantly, as a last resort, which only compounded the problem. Now the allure of liberal bromides on academic freedom and freedom of expression has worn off. The recourse to neo-Buddhism aspires to shift our way of thinking from freedom to harm-less-ness in a systematic manner—that is, in a theoretically sustainable manner—by providing a framework of thought free of despair, in which both harm and harm-less-ness have been extensively explored for millennia.

In its turn, this shift raises its own difficult questions: What, after all, is the definition of harm? Who determines this definition? These and similar questions are important, though it is not possible for me to answer them in the context of this essay, which is written with an urgent sense of purpose to make a small contribution to new ways of thinking. For now, I can only refer us to the entirety of the Buddhist tradition, which has an extended discussion of what constitutes harm, what harm’s origins are, why one should contest harm wherever it is found, and the practices that allow a life oriented toward harm-less-ness in all its forms. Ambedkar’s scholarship offers a good place to enter this tradition.⁹

My turn to this tradition is also motivated by a desire to decolonize theory. What would a decolonizing, harm-less approach entail in response to the challenges posed on US college campuses by debates around Palestine-Israel (especially the decades-long history of occupation and settler colonialism by Israel), the violent events of October 7th, and the genocide being visited upon Gaza by Israel with US funds and weapons? There is much to be said about ahimsic approaches to Palestine-Israel itself. However, in keeping with the call for this special issue and the professed mandate of the MLA—though not, alas, the actions of the MLA Executive Council with regard to the BDS resolution—I will restrict myself to a few observations in the context of the Palestine-related events on college campuses in 2023–24 and, more broadly, the purpose of higher education.

What is interesting about the wide media coverage of these events on college campuses is the insistence with which claims of harm insert themselves into the conversation—harm to Jewish students, to Palestinian students in Gaza left without any institute of higher education (widely commented on), to the Palestinian students attacked in Vermont, to pro-Palestine students doxed by trucks, to the victims of October 7th, to the Israeli hostages in Gaza, to the Palestinian victims of starvation and punitive withholding of health care in Gaza, to the more than 45,000 people killed in Israel’s indiscriminate military campaign in Gaza (according to official tolls; unofficially, probably as high as 186,000 or even more in mid-2024),¹⁰ and to the more recent victims in Lebanon and Syria.

In this difficult, violence-soaked context, take the example of the campus encampments. By and large, as widely reported, the encampments were peaceful gatherings; they disrupted the normal functioning of universities, yes, but only within norms that were largely harm-less.¹¹ Yet, the response in most universities was to send in the police, make arrests, and break the encampments down forcibly.¹² At UCLA, the police and campus enforcement personnel stood by and watched, for hours, as violent counterprotesters assaulted students within the encampments, and later California Highway Patrol officers themselves fired stun grenades and rubber bullets at faculty members and students. Furthermore, since the goal of the encampments was to stop the grim violence in Gaza, and ahimsic principle is not only prohibitive but also affirmative, shouldn’t we, in fact, celebrate such encampments for comporting with the goals of ahimsa?

The encampments are one example. We could multiply such examples, but will, in the end, arrive at one inescapable conclusion: that the pursuit of ahimsa as a value preferable to freedom requires us to reconceptualize the university as such.

Imagine a university established on ahimsic principles. Imagine university presidents and administrators who have read Ambedkar and other neo-Buddhists and are committed to enabling ahimsic values. What would such a university look like, and how would such administrators act in the present context? I suspect the encampments would not even exist, because university leaders would, themselves, be doing what brave students are doing: calling Israel and Zionism to account for their actions. Would administrators also call Hamas to account? Surely, but not in a way that erases history or the immense differences in right, suffering, and potential for genocidal extinction that exist today between Palestinians—especially Gazans—and Jewish Israeli citizens. I also suggest that we resist the temptation—indeed, all too often, a himsic Zionist directive—to read the undoubted tragedy of twentieth-century Jewish history in Europe as an alibi for Israeli violence against Palestinians in West Asia.

I don’t want to conclude, however, with a grand thought experiment aimed at rethinking the university. Rather, let me end more simply with an invitation to engage the neo-Buddhist tradition with our skills as humanities scholars—scholars whose broad concern with the human can be a point of entry for the ennobling embrace of life-affirming ideas and principles from around the globe, from non-Euro-American as well as Euro-American traditions. Amid Israel’s widely condemned war on Gaza and decades-long illegal occupation of Palestinian land, ahimsic principles can provide thoughtful academic citizens with clarifying principles of action regarding academic freedom and freedom of expression. In the present context, this tradition can help us ground our approach to academic freedom and freedom of speech in an assessment of harmful content rather than in a notion of abstract freedom. And amid the tumult on our campuses over Palestine-Israel, neo-Buddhist notions of harm-less-ness can guide our everyday interactions with students—in the classroom, in research, in meetings, in administrative work, and in the spelling-out of appropriate policies in response to student demands. The larger issues of foundational institutional changes to which this exploration will eventually take us can, as they should, follow naturally from this preliminary work.

Because of my acute sense of the value of such preliminary work—of committing to ahimsa in matters small as well as big, in the everyday as well as the long-term—I find atrocious the decision of the MLA Executive Council to not forward to the Delegate Assembly the proposed BDS resolution responding to the violence being inflicted on Gaza by the Israeli state. (I am one of the original proposers of the BDS resolution, and I cosigned the response to the decision of the MLA leadership published in Literary Hub [Alessandrini et al.].) Simply put, the MLA’s response to the resolution is depressingly familiar, and fearful. Because of a patchwork of laws around the United States that target BDS, the MLA leadership has claimed the right to preemptively protect the organization from legal and fiduciary jeopardy—even though these laws are repressive, and their legality (as well as efficacy) dubious, and even though an argument can be made that membership at large should have the right to decide what risks their organization should take, and for what purpose. I’m sure there are nuances to the decision to which I am not privy. It would be good to know what those nuances are (requests from resolution sponsors to meet with the Executive Council have not been entertained). In an organization-wide discussion, the leadership would have been able to share those nuances in detail, and would have had the opportunity to vigorously make their case before a vote is held and a decision is made.

Alternatively, forwarding the resolution might allow the leadership to enter a process of discussion and problem-solving with the membership at large, in pursuit of BDS’s eminently ahimsic strategy. BDS is a pursuit of justice through explicitly nonviolent means. If even BDS is to be denied the advocates of justice for Palestine, what, exactly, is left to them? A further imperative emerges out of the fact that BDS is protected under the First Amendment, and the prohibition of support for BDS through legislation is an unconstitutional assault on free speech (the characterization of anti-BDS legislation as unconstitutional has even been upheld by courts, as the American Civil Liberties Union has noted; see Ruane). Given this context, isn’t the MLA better served—in its own long-term organizational interests, in the interests of the academic profession it claims to care about, and in the interests of justice at large—by committing to a course of action that might include a legal strategy to undo unconstitutional anti-BDS laws, instead of rushing to comply and thus legitimate the laws and the assault on free speech that the laws represent?

In the end, there is one overarching question left to ponder: What use is an organization of humanists that is not able to find ways to commit itself to the pursuit of harm-less-ness, in both its negative and affirmative senses, at a time of genocide?

Notes

Thank you to Tony Alessandrini and Cindy Franklin for reading and offering comments on this article, especially on such short notice.

1 Academic freedom refers to freedoms specific to faculty members based on their professional identity and is not constitutionally guaranteed; freedom of expression, or free speech, is a broader right based on the United States Constitution. For a concise and useful review of the distinctions, see Robbins.

2 See Bazelon and Homans for a convenient review of recent actions on campuses relating to Palestine-Israel, including incidents referred to in this article.

3 By liberal I mean a philosophical tradition, not a position on the political spectrum.

4 For journalistic reports on this decision, see Quinn; Dutton.

5 Hence, and because I participated in drafting the MLA BDS resolution and am one of the original signers of the resolution, it is hardly possible for me to continue blithely with the publication of this essay in its original form in an MLA journal as if nothing has happened since I submitted the essay for consideration.

6 The Palestine exception to free speech has become increasingly evident since Steve Salaita was fired from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2014. Palestine Legal has a report on the issue entitled The Palestine Exception to Free Speech. For a useful summary of more recent events that fall under the Palestine exception, see Dadabhoy and Rambaran-Olm.

7 For the unconstitutionality of the laws, see “Types of Legislation” and especially “Legal Challenges.”

8 For an example of the continued resonance of this well-known statement, see Mondal.

9 For a few additional relevant notes, see my article “The Ruse of Freedom.”

10 On 16 December 2024, the United Nations noted that the official death toll had passed 45,000 (“Gaza Death Toll”). In a July 2024 report in The Lancet, Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf note, “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza” (Khatib et al.).

11 For a moving affirmation of the peaceful nature of the UCLA encampment, see Kelley.

12 A few campuses acted differently and negotiated with student leaders.

Works Cited

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