“Dead Dogmas” and Chauvinisms: An Introduction to the Blog

John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty that if a person’s ideas are not “not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, [they] will be held as . . . dead dogma, not . . . living truth.” Mill’s concern was that if people did not regularly challenge their opinions, they couldn’t truly understand or support them. Instead, their beliefs would become mere superstitions. These superstitions might actually turn out to be true, but only by happenstance.

Mill’s argument is one of the strongest in favor of what we might consider low-value speech–what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to as “the thought that we hate.” For instance, consider a person who denies the existence of gravity or claims that the Earth is flat. Could you explain why you know they’re wrong without resorting to Wikipedia? I couldn’t. Under Mill’s conception, the thought that we hate serves an important purpose because it forces us to justify our hatred.

We constantly prevent our ideas from becoming dead dogmas in everyday life, in circumstances ranging from the banal (think parents exhorting their children to actually try the peas before they say they don’t like them) to the deeply meaningful (such as when Amish youths go through rumspringa, the period in which they must decide if they wish to become adult members of the church). Approximately every six months, I force myself to go through this process and reconfirm that peas are in fact pretty gross.

Chauvinism is excessive or prejudiced support of one’s own cause. It is the classic dead dogma: a belief unsupported by evidence and reasoned thinking. I named this blog “Chauvinisms” because my core goal in writing it is to prevent my opinions from becoming dead dogmas. (It’s also the only pun on my last name that I could think of.) I think that writing the blog will help me achieve this goal in two ways.

First, I am best able to organize my thoughts when I write them down. The writing process forces me to marshal facts and arguments in an organized, understandable manner. Over the last couple of years, when I’ve gotten hung up on an idea, I’ve written a law review article about it. Despite my best efforts though, I can’t write a law review article about every thought that gets stuck in my head–my list of paper ideas is already too long, and it is growing. I hope that the more informal (and shorter!) medium of a blog will help me work through ideas more quickly.

Second, I hope that people will respond to the things that I say here. I hope they will point out my chauvinism and explain why I’m wrong. I hope they will highlight powerful arguments and evidence that I haven’t considered. I hope that even if they don’t convince me to change my mind, they at least force me to reassess why I think the way I do. Through this back-and-forth, my beliefs (and theirs) can become living truths.

My plan is to focus on law, literature, and culture (Really? That’s all?!), but I’m sure I’ll end up writing about other things as well. I have several topics I plan on writing about over the next couple of weeks, including microaggressions in sports, Betty Miller’s novel Farewell Leicester Square, and a phenomenon I’ve been thinking of as “performative law.” I hope you will follow along, and that you will let me know what you think–both when you think I’m right and especially when you think I’m wrong.