“It is that no government, institution or social faction can be trusted with the power to decide which opinions may be expressed.”
This has always struck me as the simplest even-a-fifth-grader-can-understand-it explanation of why we need free speech.
So I always find it just …*weird* … that so many people, usually progressives, are still pushing for restrictions on categories of speech. Despite the fact that, well, in the US, Trump is the president and both houses of Congress are controlled by R’s, so whoever is in charge of deciding what speech will be prohibited will almost certainly not prohibit the speech that progressives want prohibited. And would probably prohibit a lot of speech that progressives don’t want prohibited.
So of course I’m frustrated that my response to these suggestions - “So you want to give the Trump administration the power to decide what speech is acceptable” - does not lead to immediate recantation and conversion.
The only logical explanation, I suppose, is that I am talking to fourth graders.
The question your argument leaves unaddressed is what happens when the prevailing moral orthodoxy is itself the mechanism of societal destruction, and when it has already colonized the very institutions that free speech depends on to function? The liberal framework you're describing does not protect the dissenters. It protects the ideology, under the banner of protecting speech. Liberal democratic institutions should protect my right to state uncomfortable truths yet this very same framework has provided the cultural scaffolding under which making them has been professionally and socially punished. The censorship apparatus that suppressed claims like "there are only two biological sexes," "not all white people are racist" shouldn't come as a surprise. It was the predictable output of an ideological formation that had captured institutions precisely because free speech protections allowed it to propagate unchallenged until it was entrenched. You say that, "having to continually defend freedom of speech gets in the way of the productive conversations that advance knowledge." Precisely. Waht is needed is the structural preconditions without which the principle of free speech cannot function. https://michaelronin.substack.com/p/the-knife-that-cuts-its-own-throat?r=kmned
I agree with everything here, but I wonder if there's an important lens that is missing (from here and the "free speech" conversation in general)?
What do you think about the role of "social consequences" to punish speech that society broadly finds socially unacceptable? IMO, overt, hateful, eliminationist bigotry is a violation of our 'universal moral taboos' and is not something we should tolerate within polite society, even if we protect everyone's legal rights to express this hatred. I believe such 'principled ostracism' was critical in marginalizing and defeating the KKK (that's why they had to wear hoods and hide their identities), and is the same playbook we must follow today, or we will see this hateful bigotry normalize and spiral us into violence and anarchy at unprecedented levels. And I believe this can be done in a principled way that doesn't violate the 1A or succumb to the excesses of "cancel culture".
I recently wrote (https://whiterosemagazine.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-more-speech) about my criticism of "free speech culture" absolutism, as espoused by Greg Lukianoff and FIRE, as I believe it introduces a dangerous loophole when they say "we want all Nazis to reveal themselves" AND "any Nazis fired for their legal speech is cancel culture and thus bad", or "you shouldn't have to choose between having a job and an opinion." Those might be good taglines, but I believe they fail on principle, because it's unreasonable to argue that somebody should and would have a regular job if they spent their weekends openly calling for discrimination or violence against Jews, blacks, Asians, whites, men, Republicans, etc. My only ask to Greg and FIRE is to stop speaking so broadly, applying the same (correct) absolutism of "free speech laws" to "free speech culture".
I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts on this. Do you agree that there's a tremendous risk to society, and almost a guarantee of it coming to pass, if there are NO social consequences/incentives for people to NOT express such overt, hateful bigotry (AKA if nothing is "taboo")? Do you see our collective response to marginalizing the KKK as a reasonable playbook of principled ostracism we should pursue today? If you don't, I'd love to understand why.
I’ve just explained why in this piece and, I believe, to you before.
You won’t get everybody to collectively socially shame certain beliefs because people have different beliefs. They will be critical of the ones they disapprove of and think poorly of the people who express them and not want to be friends with them.
It is not that you can say “We should all collectively shame and not tolerate white supremacists” and get a consensus on this by magic. Nor will other people who think we should all collectively shame people for being gay or having interracial relationships.
If we lived in a reality where there were ‘universal moral taboos’ against racism, we wouldn’t need to make arguments about it. Clearly, you do. If I said, right now, “Yes, we should all socially disapprove of bad things” it wouldn’t make any difference, would it? If I wanted to get everybody on board, Id still need to make a case for why the bad thing is bad, why people should care about it being bad, why they should show this socially. If we got enough of a consensus on this to no longer to need to argue that, we’d not need to argue it. Like we no longer have to argue against child sacrifice as a practice.
The fact that we do still need to oppose virulent racism indicates that there is not a consensus and you will be socially shamed for being racist in some social circles and for not being racist in others. All we can do now is make good arguments.
I’m only repeating what I have already said a million times and also just written in the piece you are responding to. I cannot set this out any more clearly.
I’m going to see you out now, though, because I am out of patience with you never seeming to hear me on this subject and also suggesting that I might just not have thought about the “But isn’t it good to socially shame bad ideas really?” argument. I have agreed that this is the way to legitimately defeat bad ideas but also that it’s quite clearly an organic process hundreds of times. As we increasingly recognise ideas to be bad collectively, we naturally lose respect and liking for people who express them and they become less popular because people want ti be respected by their peers. Your naive suggestion that we just start at the end somehow and have this consensus and do the shaming as some kind of activism is either a failure to recognise that to get a genuine consensus, you still have to make arguments and convince people and show bad ideas to be bad or a desire to impose values on others via illiberal activism.
I was needing very much to hear many of these things because lately I have felt very dispirited. I do believe that gender critical feminism morphed into a wing of MAGA because of exclusion from mainstream institutions. Those activists were welcomed with open arms by Fox News, right wing publications, and even Evangelical Christian podcasts. They justified their collaboration with such media because they felt silenced elsewhere and saw this as their only opportunity to get their point of view heard on a national level.
While I understand how it happened, I feel very judgey about them doing what I would never do: form an alliance with blatant racists and Christian nationalists because of an unrelated shared objective. I mean, maybe if we were in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, I would be willing to work with people like that in distributing food or medical help — but penises in locker rooms? That’s cause for abandoning or ignoring all other values? And people who never showed a bit of interest in the condition of our prisons (which are among the worst in the industrialized world) have been, for the last decade, single-mindedly focused on publicizing and opposing the presence of transwomen in women’s prisons — and they’re doing it in cooperation with groups seeking to criminalize abortion nationally and even repeal the 19th amendment which guarantees women the right to vote.
They have discredited themselves beyond repair, I think, and I wonder: what happens next? Transgender people have been stripped of a number of basic rights at the federal level — you probably heard about Caitlin Jenner’s renewed passport identifying her as male — and in red states there are scores of bills seeking to establish laws restricting their employment. There are even efforts to outlaw wearing clothing marketed to one’s non-natal sex. Many of these far right objectives are likely (but not guaranteed) to fail, and Democrats will almost certainly fully retake the government in the next two election cycles and reverse Trump’s executive orders.
It will be very difficult, then, to take a strong stand against retaliation and score-settling without appearing to support the substance of what these people have represented. So the early part of your piece seems especially pertinent, the part about how it’s natural to want to represent one’s own stand alongside the defense of the free speech of people one doesn’t really respect or like. But I have a hard time envisioning what that means, practically; I don’t know what the nuts and bolts are, how free discourse can be built when so much indifference and ill will have been shown.
I despise the Robin DiAngelo style of antiracism but we all saw what happened at Trump’s birthday event: as part of the country’s semiquincentennial, in front of the White House, in an event funded by taxpayer dollars, a shirtless MMA fighter bellowed into a microphone: “Michelle Obama is a man!” He was met with cheers and applause. (There are millions of American racists who are unable to get over their indignance that a black man was president of this country for 8 years.) If that’s not systemic racism, what is? And of course, hectoring privilege walks in schools and workplaces aren’t going to do anything to help, but I wonder what will? How are we going to avoid a reprise of all that 2018—2022 bullshit? It seems important to be thinking about this now. An article like this one has me doing that but I’m really just a nobody — I hope your ideas reach people who can actually do something.
“It is that no government, institution or social faction can be trusted with the power to decide which opinions may be expressed.”
This has always struck me as the simplest even-a-fifth-grader-can-understand-it explanation of why we need free speech.
So I always find it just …*weird* … that so many people, usually progressives, are still pushing for restrictions on categories of speech. Despite the fact that, well, in the US, Trump is the president and both houses of Congress are controlled by R’s, so whoever is in charge of deciding what speech will be prohibited will almost certainly not prohibit the speech that progressives want prohibited. And would probably prohibit a lot of speech that progressives don’t want prohibited.
So of course I’m frustrated that my response to these suggestions - “So you want to give the Trump administration the power to decide what speech is acceptable” - does not lead to immediate recantation and conversion.
The only logical explanation, I suppose, is that I am talking to fourth graders.
The question your argument leaves unaddressed is what happens when the prevailing moral orthodoxy is itself the mechanism of societal destruction, and when it has already colonized the very institutions that free speech depends on to function? The liberal framework you're describing does not protect the dissenters. It protects the ideology, under the banner of protecting speech. Liberal democratic institutions should protect my right to state uncomfortable truths yet this very same framework has provided the cultural scaffolding under which making them has been professionally and socially punished. The censorship apparatus that suppressed claims like "there are only two biological sexes," "not all white people are racist" shouldn't come as a surprise. It was the predictable output of an ideological formation that had captured institutions precisely because free speech protections allowed it to propagate unchallenged until it was entrenched. You say that, "having to continually defend freedom of speech gets in the way of the productive conversations that advance knowledge." Precisely. Waht is needed is the structural preconditions without which the principle of free speech cannot function. https://michaelronin.substack.com/p/the-knife-that-cuts-its-own-throat?r=kmned
Excellent piece Helen.
I agree with everything here, but I wonder if there's an important lens that is missing (from here and the "free speech" conversation in general)?
What do you think about the role of "social consequences" to punish speech that society broadly finds socially unacceptable? IMO, overt, hateful, eliminationist bigotry is a violation of our 'universal moral taboos' and is not something we should tolerate within polite society, even if we protect everyone's legal rights to express this hatred. I believe such 'principled ostracism' was critical in marginalizing and defeating the KKK (that's why they had to wear hoods and hide their identities), and is the same playbook we must follow today, or we will see this hateful bigotry normalize and spiral us into violence and anarchy at unprecedented levels. And I believe this can be done in a principled way that doesn't violate the 1A or succumb to the excesses of "cancel culture".
I recently wrote (https://whiterosemagazine.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-more-speech) about my criticism of "free speech culture" absolutism, as espoused by Greg Lukianoff and FIRE, as I believe it introduces a dangerous loophole when they say "we want all Nazis to reveal themselves" AND "any Nazis fired for their legal speech is cancel culture and thus bad", or "you shouldn't have to choose between having a job and an opinion." Those might be good taglines, but I believe they fail on principle, because it's unreasonable to argue that somebody should and would have a regular job if they spent their weekends openly calling for discrimination or violence against Jews, blacks, Asians, whites, men, Republicans, etc. My only ask to Greg and FIRE is to stop speaking so broadly, applying the same (correct) absolutism of "free speech laws" to "free speech culture".
I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts on this. Do you agree that there's a tremendous risk to society, and almost a guarantee of it coming to pass, if there are NO social consequences/incentives for people to NOT express such overt, hateful bigotry (AKA if nothing is "taboo")? Do you see our collective response to marginalizing the KKK as a reasonable playbook of principled ostracism we should pursue today? If you don't, I'd love to understand why.
I’ve just explained why in this piece and, I believe, to you before.
You won’t get everybody to collectively socially shame certain beliefs because people have different beliefs. They will be critical of the ones they disapprove of and think poorly of the people who express them and not want to be friends with them.
It is not that you can say “We should all collectively shame and not tolerate white supremacists” and get a consensus on this by magic. Nor will other people who think we should all collectively shame people for being gay or having interracial relationships.
If we lived in a reality where there were ‘universal moral taboos’ against racism, we wouldn’t need to make arguments about it. Clearly, you do. If I said, right now, “Yes, we should all socially disapprove of bad things” it wouldn’t make any difference, would it? If I wanted to get everybody on board, Id still need to make a case for why the bad thing is bad, why people should care about it being bad, why they should show this socially. If we got enough of a consensus on this to no longer to need to argue that, we’d not need to argue it. Like we no longer have to argue against child sacrifice as a practice.
The fact that we do still need to oppose virulent racism indicates that there is not a consensus and you will be socially shamed for being racist in some social circles and for not being racist in others. All we can do now is make good arguments.
I’m only repeating what I have already said a million times and also just written in the piece you are responding to. I cannot set this out any more clearly.
No, everybody serious thinks there is need for a lot of nuance. I’ve been writing with what I hope is nuance for 15 years on the subject and this is partly why I don’t want to go back to the basics in notes. Here is where I have addressed your specific employment related questions. https://www.hpluckrose.com/p/the-difference-between-incitement-66c?r=1nm3qt&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Here is where I have addressed the broader issue in most fundamental detail. https://freethinker.co.uk/2024/05/the-marketplace-of-ideas-will-always-exist-the-only-choice-we-have-is-how-to-work-with-it/
I’m going to see you out now, though, because I am out of patience with you never seeming to hear me on this subject and also suggesting that I might just not have thought about the “But isn’t it good to socially shame bad ideas really?” argument. I have agreed that this is the way to legitimately defeat bad ideas but also that it’s quite clearly an organic process hundreds of times. As we increasingly recognise ideas to be bad collectively, we naturally lose respect and liking for people who express them and they become less popular because people want ti be respected by their peers. Your naive suggestion that we just start at the end somehow and have this consensus and do the shaming as some kind of activism is either a failure to recognise that to get a genuine consensus, you still have to make arguments and convince people and show bad ideas to be bad or a desire to impose values on others via illiberal activism.
I was needing very much to hear many of these things because lately I have felt very dispirited. I do believe that gender critical feminism morphed into a wing of MAGA because of exclusion from mainstream institutions. Those activists were welcomed with open arms by Fox News, right wing publications, and even Evangelical Christian podcasts. They justified their collaboration with such media because they felt silenced elsewhere and saw this as their only opportunity to get their point of view heard on a national level.
While I understand how it happened, I feel very judgey about them doing what I would never do: form an alliance with blatant racists and Christian nationalists because of an unrelated shared objective. I mean, maybe if we were in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, I would be willing to work with people like that in distributing food or medical help — but penises in locker rooms? That’s cause for abandoning or ignoring all other values? And people who never showed a bit of interest in the condition of our prisons (which are among the worst in the industrialized world) have been, for the last decade, single-mindedly focused on publicizing and opposing the presence of transwomen in women’s prisons — and they’re doing it in cooperation with groups seeking to criminalize abortion nationally and even repeal the 19th amendment which guarantees women the right to vote.
They have discredited themselves beyond repair, I think, and I wonder: what happens next? Transgender people have been stripped of a number of basic rights at the federal level — you probably heard about Caitlin Jenner’s renewed passport identifying her as male — and in red states there are scores of bills seeking to establish laws restricting their employment. There are even efforts to outlaw wearing clothing marketed to one’s non-natal sex. Many of these far right objectives are likely (but not guaranteed) to fail, and Democrats will almost certainly fully retake the government in the next two election cycles and reverse Trump’s executive orders.
It will be very difficult, then, to take a strong stand against retaliation and score-settling without appearing to support the substance of what these people have represented. So the early part of your piece seems especially pertinent, the part about how it’s natural to want to represent one’s own stand alongside the defense of the free speech of people one doesn’t really respect or like. But I have a hard time envisioning what that means, practically; I don’t know what the nuts and bolts are, how free discourse can be built when so much indifference and ill will have been shown.
I despise the Robin DiAngelo style of antiracism but we all saw what happened at Trump’s birthday event: as part of the country’s semiquincentennial, in front of the White House, in an event funded by taxpayer dollars, a shirtless MMA fighter bellowed into a microphone: “Michelle Obama is a man!” He was met with cheers and applause. (There are millions of American racists who are unable to get over their indignance that a black man was president of this country for 8 years.) If that’s not systemic racism, what is? And of course, hectoring privilege walks in schools and workplaces aren’t going to do anything to help, but I wonder what will? How are we going to avoid a reprise of all that 2018—2022 bullshit? It seems important to be thinking about this now. An article like this one has me doing that but I’m really just a nobody — I hope your ideas reach people who can actually do something.