 I'd like to welcome you all to our first talking in the library event for this fall semester. And it's generously supported by an endowment from a former alumna, Mary Tuft White, and this room was named after her. I'm Betsy Peck, learned dean of university libraries, and we're so excited to welcome Dr. Teresa Bejan from the University of Oxford to speak about our university's namesake, Roger Williams. In my 32 years here, this is the first time we've ever had someone speak about Roger Williams. So, pretty exciting. Professor and library program director Adam Braver will introduce Dr. Bejan in a moment, and I personally want to thank Professor Mel Topp, where is he? Somewhere, he's here, I saw him. There he is, in the back, for suggesting our speaker and for garnering enthusiasm and support from our former president, Donald Farrish, who as most of you know passed away in June. I'm so sorry he is not with us today, he really wanted to be here. Our additional events this semester include a lecture by the author Amy Wallen, who will speak about her recent memoir when we were ghouls at the Rajasthri Library in Bristol on October 17th. Our third speaker, Nyla Al-Atrash, who was to speak on art and resistance in the Syrian crisis, unfortunately had to cancel, so we're very sorry, but we'll hope to get her back at some point. And we're currently looking for a replacement for that talking in the library event. We'll soon announce our spring semester events, so please stay tuned. And now, I'd like to ask Adam to introduce our speaker. So I was going to get you a question. Alright, thanks everybody for coming out. When I first moved to Rhode Island to work here, I confess I'd never heard of Roger Williams the man, or at least it didn't register. Growing up in California, I'd been schooled in my own state's history, knowing the myths and legends from John Sutter and John Marshall to Father Huna Paro-Sera to is she the last of his tribe to Lola Montez to the murderer's row of robber barons? Yet I'd never heard of Roger Williams. Truly, as I know now, a blind spot for me once I came to learn how much he was credited for as someone who championed and stood up for and lived with many of the values that I hold dear. As with great literary characters, some people manage to keep entering our public discourse throughout points in history. Maybe because they embody something greater than their time. Maybe because they embody a certain sui generis soul of humanity, a constant that it turns out is not tied to an era or a moment, but instead tied to something across the generations. Today you'll hear from Dr. Teresa Beijon not only what Roger Williams meant to the experiment of a true social democracy in the 17th century, but what he still means to it in the 21st century and how in many ways he can provide answers to some of the vexing questions of our day. In her recent book, Mere Civility, Disagreements and the Limits of Toleration, Dr. Beijon examines great thinkers of the 17th century, including Roger Williams. As part of her inquiry, she asks an important question of our day. How do we as a culture who value civility respond to incivility and its taunts to stray away from that civility we value? And civility ultimately maintained in the face of incivility. And in seeking those answers among the people she looks to, of course, the reason we're here today is Roger Williams. Dr. Beijon is an associate professor of political theory at Oxford University, a North Carolina native. She studied at University of Chicago and earned her PhD at Yale. But for now, she is here and our guest at RWU in Bristol, Rhode Island. And so please welcome Dr. Beijon. I can't say how wonderful it is to see so many people here to hear a talk about Roger Williams. And that's only compounds the pleasure and the honor it is for me to be here in the first place. I had the additional pleasure of being a visitor to Professor Im's Roger seminar yesterday, and I had a chance to talk to some of your incoming first year students, some of whom I see in the audience. And I just have to say, I was hugely impressed. It's wonderful to be surrounded by such bright and keen students who, although they may have been faintly traumatized by my enthusiasm for Roger Williams, withstood it with very good cheer. Cheers. So as Professor Braver said, I'm a Southerner, and coming to your campus feels kind of like a homecoming for me, because Roger Williams is a particular hero of mine, if a somewhat unlikely one. Now, the unlikeliness of Roger Williams' heroism might sound strange at first to you all here assembled, because you here at this university and in this state are in the habit of finding him heroic. His name is on your university, on buildings, on statues, like the one I had my picture taken with outside, on monuments, all erected to Williams not only as the founder of the state of Rhode Island, but also as an icon of tolerance and of the liberty of conscience. And all of these monuments are great to see, but I'll confess that they also make me slightly uncomfortable. And I kind of want to explore that uncomfortableness, because I worry that in building monuments to Williams, we may risk losing sight of, and perhaps losing touch with, Roger Williams, the man with his feet of clay, and all. And so today in my talk, I want to engage in a bit of, if you will, iconoclasm. And in doing so, I'd like to say that I am keeping the authentic spirit of Roger Williams, who was quite the iconoclast himself, alive. I want to smash some idols for you today so as to bring us back in touch with the living, breathing, all too human, historical person, Mr. Roger Williams beneath. I feel I should warn you first that you may find some of what I'm going to say shocking, even a bit offensive. But if so, again, I'm only keeping alive the spirit of Williams himself, your founder and my hero, of whom one particularly grouchy interlocutor once accused of, quote, having a face of brass so that he could not blush. And so I mean, I can blush, but hopefully, I won't too much here. And so I thought it fitting to begin somewhat close to home with one of Roger Williams' most famous quotations, one that I know has appeared on promotional literature for this university in the past and has been used by other universities or not in Rhode Island and is all over the internet when you search for famous quotations of Roger Williams. Have you seen this before? Raise your hand if this is familiar, right? The greatest crime in the world is not developing your potential. When you do what you do best, you are helping not only yourself but the world. So some of you are familiar with this. Raise your hand if you think that Roger Williams actually said it. What might be some clues that this is a spurious quotation that Roger Williams could not have said this? Pick on some of the students I taught yesterday. You read some Roger Williams. Is his prose this clear? No. As a consummate writer and trained minister of the 17th century, I hate to break it to you. Roger Williams' prose is quite a bit more baroque. Also, I mean, you have the clue that potential in this sense of something that an individual could have is not current as a noun in English until the 18th and not common until the 19th centuries. But not only couldn't Williams have said it, he also, I want to argue to you, wouldn't have said it. And here's a clue as to why. Here's an authentic quote from Roger Williams to compare from his most famous defense of religious toleration, the so-called Bloody Tenant of Persecution, published in 1644 and a book so scandalous, so radical in its call for toleration, that the English Parliament ordered it burned by the public hangman. Okay, clutch your pearls, everyone, hold on to your hats. Whenever a toleration of others' religion and conscience is pleaded for, such as are I hope in truth zealous for God, readily produce plenty of scriptures written to the church, all commanding and pressing the putting forth of the unclean, the cutting off of the obstinate, the purging of heretics, as if because briars, thorns, and thistles may not be in the garden of the church, therefore must all be plucked out of the wilderness of the world. Whereas he that is a briar, that is a Jew, a Turk, a pagan, an anti-Christian today may be when the word of the Lord runs freely a member of Jesus Christ tomorrow. This is what Roger Williams sounded like. With all his puritanical zeal and 17th century style, except with a few biblical quotations excised for the sake of brevity. But here we also have Williams' characteristically evangelical case for religious toleration, an argument that we should tolerate religious differences not because of every individual's infinitely special individual potential, but because of every individual's potential to become a good Christian as Williams defined it, despite their current extricable spiritual errors. Now raise your hand if you're a bit uncomfortable. Thank you. Now raise your hand if you're actually a bit uncomfortable. Yeah, thank you. In pointing this out though, my point, my intention is not to unmask or debunk or to say that Roger Williams is not a man worthy of celebration or commemoration, quite the opposite. Indeed, what I'm going to argue to you today is that the real Roger Williams in all of his imperfection and all of his humanity is far more heroic, his true voice far more inspiring than the one that you find in history books and promotional literature. All right, for the real Roger Williams also said the following. Notwithstanding several religions in one nation, in one shire, yea, in one family, if men be but truly civil and walk by the rules of humanity and civility, families, towns, cities and common wheels in the midst of spiritual differences may flourish. So today I want to suggest that we can learn an awful lot more about how to deal with difference in the messy business of coexistence with those we hate because hatred is a permanent feature of a tolerant society, according to Roger Williams. We can learn a lot more about that from the real Roger Williams and his evangelical understanding of mere civility than from any kind of romanticized, idealized 1960s style conscientious objector on the pillar down the road in Providence. And so in the rest of my talk I'm going to be recovering Roger Williams, the man, the real Roger Williams, and what he has to teach us about dealing with difference by focusing on one notoriously difficult problem in particular. The problem of tolerating intolerance or the famous and familiar question should a tolerant society tolerate the intolerant? This is one of the most vexed and difficult questions facing any tolerant society, whether it was 17th century Rhode Island or indeed the 21st century United States. And the so-called paradox of tolerance was put most memorably by Carl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies first published in 1945. And you can see here how Popper puts the paradox thus, quote, Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them. And Popper's answer then is famous, we should therefore claim in the name of tolerance the right not to tolerate the intolerant. And in coming to this conclusion Popper was simply echoing other titans of tolerance, consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the social contract. It is impossible to live in peace with those we regard as damned. This is a quote, it's this quote favorably by no less a liberal authority than John Rawls in A Theory of Justice for those of you keeping score. In a century before that, the very father of liberal toleration, someone else who I write and I write and think about quite a lot, John Locke wrote, I say these have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate that will not own and teach the duty of tolerating all men in matters of mere religion. So it's not just enough that you not persecute, you actually have to teach in your church not that you have to tolerate all men in matters of mere religion. And today I submit, you know, in certain circles this is the consensus position that the intolerant have no right to be tolerated and that a tolerant society should do its best to suppress and exclude them so as to signal to them and to others that they are beyond the pale of social life. But today I'm going to argue that Roger Williams, both in his life and in his works, poses a serious challenge to this consensus and that he gives us, I think, good reasons to think that a tolerant society may have to tolerate the intolerant too. So let's begin with the facts as we know them. Fact number one, that in founding Rhode Island, Roger Williams founded the most tolerant society the world had ever seen. This is true. Not only was Rhode Island the site of the first synagogue in North America in the 1650s, Williams himself was also an advocate for the American Indians and their religion and he opposed organized missionary efforts among them and pled for toleration on behalf of the Narragansett tribe to parliament itself. Rhode Island was also the first fully secular society in Christendom, a society which separated church and state, not by allowing for dissent within an established church, but by having no established church at all. We take that for granted in America, but I want to point out, I live now in a country that continues to have an established church. That's incredibly rare, having no established religion. And not only was there no establishment, Rhode Island granted citizens full civic equality regardless of their religion, right? These are both exceptional, even wacky positions for anyone to hold in the 17th century, let alone the 18th or 19th centuries. The radicalism of that cannot be overemphasized. But Roger Williams held both of these positions and what's more, he founded a society that put them into practice. But crucially, however, he came to these exceptional conclusions I would argue not because he was tolerant in our modern sense of that word, indeed because he was exactly the opposite. Today we would see Roger Williams' intolerance is the reason that he came to these radically inclusive and engaged conclusions about what a tolerant society should look like. So how did Williams get there? Might be scratching your heads here. So everyone is likely familiar with the broad outlines of Roger Williams' story, but if you're not, I'll remind you. Williams began as a religious refugee himself and that after fleeing persecution in England, he ended up being persecuted for his beliefs by his fellow Puritans in Massachusetts Bay who banished him from the colony in the dead of winter. Sheltered by the Wampanoag and Narragans at tribes, he would come to Found Road Island as a safe haven for dissenters like himself and a beacon of religious freedom for others for centuries to come. Good story. You won't see, so far so familiar, but you won't be surprised now if I complicate that just a little bit. So just to say, Williams was a religious refugee. And like most Puritans, he left England in the 1630s not just to flee the rising tide of persecution within the Church of England, but also because he had simply had enough of living with sinners. He wanted to live in a society of saints, of people who were saved with the elect. Inspired by John Winthrop, Williams hoped that Boston might become a perfectly just and virtuous city on a hill. So much for that. In which the righteous could live among the like-minded as models of Christian charity far apart from and above the rest, those he regarded as damned. But Williams was soon disappointed and it seems that his disappointment began even before he arrived. Even while he was on the boat, he began to see that the, quote, un-Christian Christians of New England, as he called them, were hypocrites who ostentatiously condemned and cried out against the sins of others while living on land that they had stolen from the Native Americans. It was in defending the land rights of the local tribes that Williams first made himself obnoxious. And because of this, some recent commentators like Martha Nussbaum and others have been tempted to romanticize Williams as America's Forgotten First Founder, who was really a modern multiculturalist. I think maybe you've heard that in your studies. But I think this rather badly misrepresents who Williams was and what he was up to. Not only did Williams himself venture among the Narragans that almost immediately upon his arrival to learn their language so as to become a missionary among them, right? He's a good evangelical. He's learning Indian languages so that he can convert. We shall also see shortly that he was no lover of their customs or their religion, which he considered to be devil worship. And he never backed down from that conclusion. But more importantly for our purposes, Williams' complaints about American expropriation were really not even the most offensive opinions that got him banished from Rhode Island. In addition to floating the suggestion that women should wear veils in public as well as in church in keeping with St. Paul's Council and Corinthians, Williams preached against the simfulness of swearing civil o's and was apparently caught defacing an English flag by cutting out the cross of St. George as a sinful combination and conflation of civil and religious powers and a violation of the necessary wall of separation between the church and the state. Which is all to say that Williams was in effect too puritan for his fellow Puritans which perhaps explains why he left Boston so soon after arriving for Salem, later famous for its witch trials because he found the religion there more congenial. This is Roger Williams. But in addition to what we might euphemistically describe is Roger Williams' strong views. It's important to remember that as an evangelical Christian Williams also saw it as his duty to witness for those views tirelessly and vehemently protest to his fellow New English and to the Native Americans alike against what he saw as their spiritual errors and their many sins. And Williams was at this for years before his fellow Puritans finally decided to banish him which should remind us of another important fact namely that Roger Williams could be really, really obnoxious. Even he would later concede that his banishment from Massachusetts had had something to do with his quote, constant admonishing of them in their unclean walking. Unquote. Here, you know, again, another that we're forced to confront the really uncomfortable truth that Roger Williams, the hero of conscience and that visionary founder of religious tolerance and the separation of church and state was really, really intolerant of other people's beliefs. In the biz that is 17th century intellectual history which happens to be the business I'm in, we would thus describe Roger Williams as quote, a intolerant tolerationist. This is the kind of phrase that we use to get a read to wrap our minds around these complicated arrangements. That is, despite his exclusive sense of the truth of his own religion, he was committed to a policy of toleration towards the errors of others while nevertheless maintaining that those were errors. And so, if the popular liberal consensus view is that we shouldn't tolerate the intolerant or those we think of as being full of hate for others in their views, on that reading, we shouldn't tolerate people like Roger Williams. He was, after all, full of hate or at least of choice and hateful words towards his religious opponents. For although he proposed to tolerate them, he never called Catholics Catholics. He always called them anti-Christians because they were followers of the papal anti-Christ. Obviously. It's really amusing. Sometimes when you're reading modern literature on Williams, they see the word anti-Christian and assume he's talking about atheists. That's not the case. He's talking about Catholics. He also calls them papists, yeah. And as for the Native Americans, Pache Martha Nussbaum, it was more than a, quote, respectful curiosity about the varieties of humanity, as she says, that led him to learn their language. He went there because he wanted to convert them and he made it very clear to them and to others that he abhorred their customs. So he says, quote, he durst not be an eyewitness spectator or looker on their religion, lest he should have been made a partaker of Satan's invention and worships. He also said things like, we all know what local tribes are capable of, what, quote, all kind of hordoms, idolatries, and conjurations. Notoriously known what conscience all pagans make of lying, stealing, horring, murdering, and for drunkenness also. And writing to a local commissioner, dealing with a land dispute in Pawtucket in the 1660s, he wrote to the official, quote, amongst such a barbarous scum and off-scoring of mankind, the business as circumstantiated will not be affected without bloodshed. Barbarians are barbarians, full stop. Still, Williams was emphatic, that there was more civility to be found among these American barbarians than among the un-Christian Christians of New England. Williams had, after all, learned the hard way after his banishment that, as he put it, quote, one must go out of the world if one would not keep civil converse with idolaters. And indeed, it was his experience of civility among the Narragansett and other pagans in the wilderness that led him to believe that even those who disagreed on the fundamentals of faith and were mutually intolerant of each other's errors could still share a common life. It should be clear, though, by now, I hope, that by civil, Williams certainly did not mean polite. As a tireless and obstreperous evangelist, he knew from experience just how uncivil that evangelism could seem to those on the receiving end. Yet, unlike Martin Luther, the founder of uncivil Protestantism, Williams refused to reserve the right to be offensive to the righteous alone. Civility, he thought, much like religious truth was in the eye of the beholder. He wrote, that ourselves and all men are apt and prone to differ, that either part or party is most right in his own eye, his cause right, his carriage right, his arguments right, his answers right, is no new thing in all the former ages or in all parts of the world. We might think that, you know, it's no new thing now, either. That's if Paul, if Jesus Christ were present here at London and the question were proposed, what religion would they approve of, the papus, preletus, Presbyterians, independence, et cetera, would each say, of mine, of mine. Of course, God's on my side. Indeed, Williams argued that the truth would always be particularly offensive to those privileged by an unjust status quo. When a kingdom or state, town or family, lies and lives in the guilt of a false God, false Christ, false worship, no wonder if sore eyes be troubled at the appearance of the light, be it never so sweet. If persons sleepy loving to sleep, be troubled at the noise of shrill, those silver alarms. Sure, lots of the first year students waking up for class know the unpleasant sensation of being woken by shrill, silver alarms. So therefore, for Williams, civility could not be a matter of policing other's speech or avoiding controversial topics or avoiding controversial people. Rather, mere civility had to begin at home with the willingness to hold one's nose and remain present to one's opponents no matter how intolerable or indeed deplorable one found their views and talk about their errors to them. That is, to their faces, not behind their backs with one's like-minded friends, which is a whole lot more fun, right, and a whole lot easier. And the point of talking to other people about their errors was ideally so that the deplorables would eventually recognize that you, not they, were right. But that was not a certain conclusion. In any case, when Canonagus, a chief, granted Williams the land that would become Providence, he decided to put this controversial, controversial, really wacky idea about civility and tolerance into practice. And even then, though, I brought this out to the students yesterday. It's not really clear that in doing this, Williams intended to found a society, let alone a tolerant one. The founding of Rhode Island seems to have been something of an accident. Williams didn't set out to lead, but he was certainly followed by fellow exiles and troublemakers like Ann Hutchinson and Samuel Gorton, who were as obnoxious, if not more, than he was, and who joined his plantation much to his chagrin. Plantation is just the 17th-century word for colony. I know there's some controversy in this state about that, but that's what it is. And so to say that the success of Williams' lively experiment in Rogues Island, as it was called by its critics, was not a foregone conclusion. That's an understatement. The self-styled Saints Next Door in Massachusetts kept complaining that Williams' colony had become, quote, the latrine of New England, and a, quote, receptacle for all sorts of riff-raff, and that there was, quote, brawling continually in Mr. Williams' meadow. Moreover, the fledgling colony was continually menaced by its neighbors. And this is one of my favorite stories. Again, you know, I guess trigger warning for bestiality. Sorry. There's an early instance of bestiality where one Richard Chasmore is caught in flagrante with his cows, and the witnesses are American Indians. And so he's acquitted because the local Rhode Island jury won't credit the testimony of Native Americans. Right? So this leads to an international incident because Roger Williams is just beside himself that this guy is going to get away with it. Chasmore goes on the lamb, so to speak. But they get him when he comes back for his cows. I can't help myself. Okay. Part of you know these everyday challenges of life among evangelicals on the colonial frontier. What was truly exceptional about Rhode Island was not just the absence of an established church, but that Rhode Island welcomed evangelical Protestants of all stripes, Jews, Muslims, American pagans, and even Catholic anti-Christians to live together on terms of equal liberty, including the liberty to proselytize and indeed to engage in so-called persecution of the tongue against their opponents. In Williams' colony, so long as you were willing to fight for your faith with words and not swords, no one was beyond the pale. Indeed, the only group, this is really interesting, the only group ever to test the limits of Williams' toleration is a group that he refers to obliquely in his famous letter to the town of Providence in 1654. So you may be familiar with this. It's called the Ship of State letter. There goes many a ship to sea with many a hundred souls in one ship whose wheel and woe is common, and this is a true picture of a commonwealth. Still, I never denied that notwithstanding this liberty of conscience, if any semen refuse to perform their service or passengers to pay their freight, if any refuse to obey the common laws and orders of the ship concerning their common peace and preservation, if any shall preach or write that there ought to be no commanders nor officers because all are equal in Christ, I say I never denied, but in such cases, whatever is pretended, the commander or commanders may judge, resist, compel, and punish such transgressors according to their desserts and merits. Any guesses as to who he may have in mind? Yeah, who's causing trouble in Rhode Island in the 1650s? None other than the nascent society of friends, the people called Quakers. Now again, to many Roger Williams boosters, his emtithy to Quakers can come as a bit of a shock, but to understand his position, first thing you have to remember that early Quakerism bears little resemblance to the Pacific society of friends that we know and love today. So in the mid-17th century, the Quakers were the epitome of the extreme enthusiastic and sectarian Protestantism that Martin Luther had kicked off the century before. It can be difficult to distinguish fact from enemy propaganda, but it still seems to be the case that Quakers were notorious, among other things, for going naked in public for a sign of their own innocence in the sins of the world, as well as for interrupting other people's worship by banging pots and pans. That sounds fun. Shouting down the minister, saying, by what authority do you preach? Shouting down judges? By what authority do you judge? In one instance, a Quaker man reportedly took off his pants in an Anglican church and laid down on the communion table. So when Quakers began flocking to Rhode Island in the 1650s, Williams was understandably terrified that they were going to prove his critics right. That toleration was indeed the whore of Babylon's back door. Whore of Babylon being the Catholic Church. So it was so dissension among Protestants so that the Catholics could take over. It was a recipe for disorder and civil strife. Williams complained that, quote, all that their religion, all that Quaker religion, requires to make converts and proselytes amounts to nothing more than what a reprobate may easily attain to. Its spirit tends mainly to reduce persons from civility to barbarism, to an arbitrary government and the dictates and decrees of that sudden spirit that acts in them. But Williams' main objection to Quakerism was perhaps surprisingly that he saw Quakers as incredibly intolerant, that their religion, quote, led to a sudden cutting off of people, the day of kings opposing them, and to his fiery persecutions for matters of religion and conscience as hath been or can be practiced by any hunters or persecutors in the world. Okay, now, you don't have to know much about Quakers to know that this sounds a bit rich, right? When was the great Quaker persecution? I mean, some people in Pennsylvania would complain. But, and it's important to keep in mind that as Williams is thinking and writing this, that Quakers would soon become subjected to intense persecution in Massachusetts. Several Quakers would be executed and flogged publicly for preaching, right? But Williams insisted that the evidence for Quaker intolerance was plain for everyone to see. It could be found in their extreme penchant for persecution of the tongue, but also in their uncivil habit of falling into silent prayer whenever anyone tried to disagree with them. So the problem with Quakers is that they won't engage. They won't engage in that civil evangelical disagreement that he thinks is essential to a tolerant society. So it seems that even Roger Williams flirted with the idea that one had a duty to, that one had a duty not to tolerate the intolerant. But thankfully for the Quakers and for us, he decided that the surest way to convince someone of the righteousness of their views, no matter how wrong or intolerant those views were, was to subject them to persecution. So he thought that the best way to prove to the Quakers that they were right was to persecute them for their beliefs. And so he refused to. Instead, he did the merely civil thing. He challenged them to a public debate and spent three days with several Quakers at Newport trying to convince them that they were wrong and he published the proceedings. And at that point, you have to keep in mind, this was in 1673. At that point, Williams was nearly 70. He was so old and ill, he had to be carried into the venue on his stick bed. But still he would not give up, right? Still he continued to practice what he preached. All right. So forget the founding. I would say that America's long tradition of free speech fundamentalism started right here in Rhode Island. It may not have been the multicultural idol imagined by some secular liberals. Still for over a century, Rogues Island was the most tolerant society the world had ever seen. Williams accomplished this by challenging what Locke would 50 years later present as obvious, namely that you can't tolerate the intolerant. That's obvious, right? And whereas Locke, who is celebrated to this day as the father of liberal toleration, excluded Catholics because they were intolerant and excluded atheists because you couldn't trust them, right? Williams, the intolerant Roger Williams included both of these groups in his tolerant society. Because unlike Locke and later Rousseau, Williams regarded living on terms of equal liberty with the damned, not as impossible. He regarded that as the point. It's not impossible to live with the damned. You have to live with the damned. Everyone but you is damned. For as Williams knew from experience, a tolerant society cannot pick and choose its materials and remain tolerant for long. Mere civility must thus serve as a tool of uncomfortable inclusion in a tolerant society. A society grounded in turn in a radical and frankly unreasonable faith in the possibility of a common life and shared future with those people we have and will continue to hate. So, so what, right? Well, I think firstly, this forgotten history, I've been hard, you know, at hard work trying to recover for you today. At the very least, I think it needs to pose a serious challenge to a lot of modern assumptions about what a tolerant or a civil society has to look like. To challenge a lot of the things that we think of as obvious about how tolerance and toleration work. The tolerant society that Williams founded accidentally when his own intolerance saw him exiled from Massachusetts Bay would never have worked in theory. I'm a political theorist. I'm a professor of political theory. This is not going to work in theory. Nevertheless, it worked in practice. This suggests that we should be very careful when we repeat conclusions that seem familiar or are obvious to us. Conclusions like locks or poppers. That of course the intolerant have no right to toleration. That's obvious. But I also want to go farther and conclude by suggesting to you today that in the United States in particular with our ongoing crises of tolerance and civility, we still have a lot to learn from Roger Williams. And because of not despite his intolerant feet of clay. Because Williams' understanding of mere civility holds out the hope that the members of a tolerant society might be able to work to make their society more just together. Despite their disagreements and dislike. Mere civility on Williams' model is thus no obstacle to crying out against injustice. Or calling out our opponent's sins. That's precisely the point. But it does demand that we do so without denying or destroying the possibility of a common life. Tomorrow with the people that we think stand in our way today. So what does mere civility demand of us? Well, that we remain committed to talking and to disagreeing. That we not pull our punches, although we may not want to land them all at once. It also demands that whenever we may be tempted to achieve a tolerant society through exclusion by pushing those we sincerely believe to be intolerant beyond the pale. We need to be careful that what we're doing is not being more concerned to avoid the disagreeableness of disagreement and to isolate ourselves in the more agreeable company of the like-minded community of saints. Whether it's online or through social media or in the real world. There's a reason that disagreeable is a synonym for unpleasant. Disagreement is hard. It is William's new well, un-murderous coexistence with the intolerant infidel next door is no picnic. But neither is the society of saints. Infidels after all are people too. So are the intolerant. Continued engagement with them on terms of mere civility may be all we can hope for. Still, it's no less important and precious for that. Thank you. I've been told that I must subject myself now to myself because I'm myriad to questions to which I will seek to provide answers. What could you say about the lessons of your talk about Roger Williams and its connection to civility in the modern university and the modern workplace where as you know many issues have come up regarding this. Right. Well, thank you for that question. Thanks for putting me on the spot right away. Well, I mean, I have a lot to say. One thing to say, though, is that to me as an intellectual historian and political theorist, there's something really weird about using the language of civility to describe the conversational virtues that we expect from members of a university. Because it seems to me that civility is the standard that applies to civil society as a whole. And universities are particular corporate bodies within liberal democracies. So that's one point. It's not obvious to me that the bar of mere civility should be the bar in a university. We might well set it higher. That being said, I think that modern universities, particularly in the United States, but maybe I'd say even particularly in the United Kingdom where I now live. You know, I teach at Oxford. I teach on a degree called Philosophy, Politics and Economics that some absurd percentage of recent prime ministers of that country have graduated from that program. So there is an extent to which if universities and colleges are functioning as credentialing institutions for the elites, for the leaders of our tolerant society, then I do think that the appropriate standard of civility to inculcate is a standard of mere civility. The standard that says civility begins at home. Don't talk about civility because you're trying to shut someone else up. Talk about it because you could be doing better. We might be left with an impression when you talk about Roger Williams and the Narragansett as someone who was hating all of their cultural, all of their beliefs. But he was like an anthropologist in many ways and I think did respect the hospitality and relationships and did learn about the culture in ways that indicated true interest and caring. So I feel that the issue of intolerance in part has to deal with not only the difference in beliefs, but also in an attitude of respect and maybe you could say a few words about that. Thank you. I mean, it's an excellent question. It's an important point. And if I've given the impression that all Roger Williams ever felt for the Americans and he called them the Americans, of course the Americans were the Native Americans, the colonists were the New English. If I gave the impression that all he had was hatred for their way of life, that's absolutely a misimpression. I did not mean to give that impression. As I was telling the students in the Roger seminar yesterday, Williams first published work when he returns to London in the 1640s was the so-called Key into the Language of America, which is the very first handbook of American Indian language published in England. It's an incredible work. I suggest that you all go look at it. It's part language manual, part anthropology, part moralizing poetry, part personal travel narrative of his encounters with individual Americans of whom he speaks very highly and fondly. I do, however, want to resist imposing the language of respect on Williams' treatment of the Americans precisely because I think that when we talk about respect today, we tend to talk about it in a kind of a Kantian sort of dignity way. I respect you as an acknowledgement of your intrinsic value and worth. I think he has respect for aspects of American Indian culture, but I think that he doesn't think that his toleration of them, he doesn't say that he can only tolerate that which he can respect. He never says that. He can tolerate those that he doesn't respect. Again, that's the language of humanity, the recognition of humanity. Roger Williams' language is not the language of respect and perhaps it's a kind of professional conceit that I'm insisting that we don't use that language of respect. But it's just, it's something you notice in a lot of contemporary arguments where we say, well, so long as we respect each other, it's going to be all right. What happens when we can't respect each other? I find your views not worthy of respect and I seriously question your reasoning capacities for holding them. It's toleration in the absence of respect that I think is really crucial. But the point is very well taken and I don't, I mean, it's absolutely the case that Williams' interest in experience with and indeed high opinion of local tribes and many local Americans is absolutely exceptional and a really important part of his story. I'm a writer and an author who's been thinking about the space of tolerance that you've been outlining. It's very interesting to me because I hadn't come in through the political theory except in a little degree or through Roger Williams and so I'm really, but I'm writing about this as part of a book related to uncertainty or unassumingness as the pathway to certain types of higher order thinking and I include tolerance in that. So I wanted to hear if you had any comments or if you've done any work on that, you know, that point but also when I use the word tolerance or speak to people in the last year, people have a bristling, you know, really sort of, it's beyond anxious, angry response. I actually gave a talk this summer and a week before the talk when I gave the title that had the word tolerance in it, I was asked to not give that talk by the Chautauqua Institution which is really supposed to be a tolerant, you know, artistic place. So I'm really interested in the depth of anger related to this word and so I wonder if you've had any pushback or you think they're, because I think tolerance can be a really robust, active, it can be everything that you're talking about but maybe there's a different word and many people see it as kind of milk toast. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for that. Those are both two excellent questions and just to the first, I would say, I love the word unassumingness. I think in my own work, I've been, I think I've been working towards something similar in the form of epistemic humility. So a sense of ourselves, a sense of the, you know, I don't worry, I'll explain. It's a sense of our own limitations as knowers. It's not the same as skepticism. It's not saying, oh, I'm skeptical that there is a true answer or that I could have access to the true answer. It simply says, I think I have the true answer, yet I'm aware of the limitations of myself as a knower and I think that is a key part of the ethical picture of mere civility as I'm working it out and indeed as I'm sort of theorizing Roger Williams' practice. Again, I think that it's something that's in short supply nowadays, as we're to say. But, you know, I'm in the business of saying unpopular things in public, so there you go, epistemic humility. I would love to hear more about your work. As to the discomfort with the language of tolerance, absolutely, it's rife in political theory as well. And indeed, I mean, the pushback against tolerance is as a kind of civilizing discourse that's understood as a way of marginalizing the marginal of oppressing the impress and indeed as being the kind of signal of a kind of Western, Protestantized, implicitly Christian way of insisting on the individual rights of conscience against an implicitly intolerant, implicitly non-white other. It's very much part of political theorist discomfort with the term tolerance and I wonder if that's something that you were coming up against. And I take that really seriously because again, my own work historically is all about how discourses of civility and tolerance are coming out of the colonial encounter. This is real. It's real and it's serious. All I would say though is as with any kind of post-colonial critique that we want to apply to a concept like civility or tolerance, we have to be really clear that we're distinguishing between abusive or abusive uses of a kind of discourse of tolerance with a kind of critique of the concept itself. It may be the case that we can never have a kind of non-oppressive or just regime of tolerance because we haven't seen one historically. Although I would say that Roger Williams Red Island gives us a really interesting example of what's possible in the 17th century. I mean, deepers. But it does not follow necessarily that because the language of tolerance is open to these abuses that we should throw out that discourse altogether. And I, I think like you, am still committed to the idea that the language and the theory of tolerance and practices of tolerance are really essential to liberal democracy of the kind that we inhabit here today. If one was to try to live by the philosophy of Roger Williams, how important do you think understanding other people's views is to having true tolerance? Great question. I'm sorry. I just made that face because sometimes I joke, you know, I would not want to live in a society of Roger Williams's. How exhausting, right? Oh my goodness. That being said, though, I do think he can be an exemplar of a particular kind of ethos of tolerance. So the question is, you know, to what extent is understanding where other people are coming from? I mean, it's related to this question about his interest in American beliefs and culture. I think understanding is crucial. Now, understanding is crucial, however, because it's essential to you being a good evangelist. You're going to be much better at converting someone if you know as much as possible about where they're coming from. And it's really, I mean, Williams is actually quite clear. At one point he says, I can't remember if it's in Bloody Tenant or Bloody Tenant yet more Bloody, just the sequel, great titles. The Americans must judge with American consciences what other consciences could they have, right? So the efforts of New English missionaries like John Elliott to Englishize the Americans, he thinks are not only wrong-headed, he thinks that they're incredibly unjust and sinful and oppressive. So I do think there you could say there's an idea of respect for the conscience of he or she whom one would persuade. But it's not, you know, it's not tantamount to a kind of open-mindedness that says, you know, hey, your culture's interesting. Let me learn about it, right? It's still, it's more strategic than that. Which isn't to say though that an interaction that can begin strategically won't turn into something else. I think that's also an important part of the story. So I have one last question here. You kept going back and forth between like Native American and American Indian. I was just curious as to like why that was. Yeah. So the reason I do that is because it's not actually fixed in the scholarship. What's the most respectful term to use? Actually, when I was doing my PhD, which wasn't that long ago, it was only a few years ago, the norm was not to say Native American any longer. It was to say American Indian. And so, you know, my preference and indeed in my book is to just use Americans. And normally when I give talks like this, I'll just say Americans. But it occurred to me in writing this one today that people might be confused. So yeah, but it's an excellent question. And I think it's a really important question for anyone who wants to engage in the kind of work that I'm doing to think about the language that we use to describe the past as itself, the product of particular histories. It's an incredibly fraught business. But I don't think that that's a reason not to do it. I wouldn't be, I wouldn't sort of let yourself being worried about the language to use to become a reason not to engage with the past or not to look for answers or look for ideas or insights in the past. And I suppose if that's the last question, which is a great question, that's what I would say to you students here as you're beginning or continuing your studies. You know, the past is a foreign country. And by golly, it's a lot weirder, but also more interesting than you think. Thank you.