Flynn asks rhetorically, “Does academia really want to ally itself with those who reserve free discussion to Philosopher Kings, and create dogmas to deaden the minds of all others?” The answer for many academics, I’m sorry to say, is a resounding yes. They see themselves as Philosopher Kings who know what is best for the masses, whom they believe are incapable of thinking as deeply as themselves.
This narcissistic arrogance goes a long way to explaining the recent and disturbing trend on college campuses to censor unwanted speech and thought (yes, thought crimes!), well documented by Greg Lukianoff, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), in his 2014 booklet Freedom From Speech.11 Readers may recall the wave of ‘disinvitations’ at universities who invited controversial (or simply interesting) speakers to enlighten their students, only to disinvite them after waves of protest from some students and faculty that the speakers’ words might offend. FIRE has documented 257 such incidents since 2000, 111 of which were successful in preventing the invited speakers from delivering their speeches (75 disinvitations, 20 speaker withdrawals, and 16 ‘heckler’s vetoes’ in which student hecklers shouted down the speakers or chased them off-stage).
The whole essay is a statement of a point of view that is hard-core truth for libertarians and seems clearly correct to the IDW but which seems to be in danger on college campuses.
Pointer from Charles Chu.
The actual right to free speech is really only a set of constraints on government. Everything else is just a set of assumed social norms.
If this topic is to mean anything, it really needs to be a discussion about what the legal and normative boundaries are for reaction to speech, and what the responsibilities of public and private institutions are. We have to protect reaction just as carefully as we do free speech.
How many times did this happen from 1982-2000?
IRE has documented 257 such incidents since 2000, 111 of which were successful in preventing the invited speakers from delivering their speeches.
So that is 257 incidents over 16 year period which comes out to less than 17 speeches per year across 1,000+ campuses? (This number feels low but it is probably not including a speaker with 10 protesters that are ignored. Of which less than 7 are canceled per year) This is a crisis and not just reasonable concern in country?!?!?! C’mon most libertarians want the populations to under-react to concerns and libertarians getting pearl clutching on 257 cases seems very whiny on their part. Also the campus PC police have been a lot quieter the last 12 months.
In general, i would agree the protesters are very counter productive mostly because:
1) It is free speech and it is wise to let people go to speeches they want to hear.
2) Protesting a speaker makes them more famous and creates the Streisand effect.
If you don’t like a speaker, ignore them. Like it not, Charles Murray probably increased book sales and has higher speaking because of the protest.
Who isn’t invited at all, Collin?
I agree with this comment. The focus on this (and even all the talk about the IDW) strikes me as very tribal.
A closed college campus experimenting with social strictures?
Rename it to private social campus and it is perfectly libertarian, done all the time. The key change, insuring it is private, and quit fouling the common semantics of education.
Since Carreyou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup just came out, and the Theranos fiasco is still fresh in the news, it serves as a good springboard for discussion. Other potential “everybody knew, nobody said anything” springboards from recent events include some of the high-profile cases of alleged sexual impropriety in the entertainment industry, elsewhere in the corporate sector, and in the Catholic Church.
Here’s the thing: our whole society has already become one big Theranos.
The new social contract is apparently a big, ugly NDA.
We can’t solve any problems, or make any collective improvements, because we can’t talk honestly about any of those problems, without getting slammed. We are forced to resort to dancing around taboos, or using abstract or evasive language bordering on Straussian coded esotericism, and unfortunately this can’t work in an environment of rampant malicious and intentional misinterpretation, just ask Robin Hanson.
The same social technologies have been used to erect impassable and insurmountable barriers around every issue of political significance, which, these days, since the state touches all, means pretty much everything. There isn’t a single subject of any importance that hasn’t been hopelessly compromised by the inability to safely say true things which are not just material – relevant and probative – but absolutely central to the matter at hand. Imagine having to conduct a trial and defend an accused under such circumstances, where all evidence of innocence is excluded.
That’s why our public intellectual life is continuing to collapse, with any attempt at genuinely serious, rigorous, and forthright discourse a futile (and very lonely) exercise.
After all, how do therse frauds go on for so long, wasting huge amounts of resources, and harming many lives, along the way? Easy: if people fear a personal penalty for talking, they’ll stay silent. That the whole point, chilling by intimidation, which sets what can and cannot be talked about, to whom and in what ways, putting certain inconvenient matters off-limits. When one is able to impose those penalties or other pressures in an institution, one gets Theranos or Cardinal “Uncle Ted” McCarrick.
Even at Theranos, Holmes tried to pressure Murdoch, a big investor, to end Carreyou’s WSJ investigation. To his credit, Murdoch refused, but one can easily imagine someone else killing the story, which would likely resulted in even more damage.
And when one is able to set the Overton Window for public discussion at large, to exclude rival arguments and viewpoints, one gets truly enormous political power. Which, again, is the whole point. We once thought the state was the primary worry in terms of imposing these conditions, and so, at least in the US, we sought to constrain that power, since it inevitably leads to harmful abuses. But times have changed, and the former equilibrium has been completely upset, and so we need to adjust our attitudes about what tools and tactics will be necessary to contain that hideous power.
Cato Unbound’s latest issue, “Free Speech in International Perspective” was overall extremely disappointing and a wasted opportunity to make this fundamental point. I would judge it as a complete intellectual failure, but in truth, how could it be otherwise?
The real trouble is, every barrier justifying prohibition on certain kinds of speech is necessarily also a meta-barrier against coherently arguing for freer speech itself. If certain speech must be prohibited because every respectable person believes it is certainly wrong, then how does one argue that contrary speech should be allowed, without painting a target on one’s back as someone who doesn’t believe in the certainty of that wrongness? Argument for the toleration of “hate speech” cannot explain the utility of that speech without at least indirectly denying the legitimacy of the standard by which it is deemed hateful, which merely opens one up to the same social sanctions and penalties.
That’s why all the old arguments about free speech fall completely flat on the typical progressive and a new generation of students marinated in that worldview since birth.
“If certain speech must be prohibited because every respectable person believes it is certainly wrong, then how does one argue that contrary speech should be allowed, without painting a target on one’s back as someone who doesn’t believe in the certainty of that wrongness?”
You’d have to explain the most basic thing over and over again, which is that abstract thinking is a step up from tribal or contextual or social thinking, which isn’t genuinely thinking. That’s just Ezra Klein’s un-evolved, reptilian brain, fearful of punishment and hungry for praise. That’s an animal reaction. It’s not worthy of a grown-up with autonomy and intelligence.
People who don’t have the courage to think abstractly about universal principles and stubborn facts need to know that they’ve mired themselves in a primordial swamp of irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas, lashing out at outsiders, affiliating with the in-group, but not thinking. Abstract thought is no respecter of persons or tribal shibboleths. In other words, people need a course in Kant and the Enlightenment and Plato and in basic logic. They need to decouple their career ambitions and dinner plans from questions of true and false.
Free speech has value in itself, in the same way that knowledge is itself worth pursuing. Obviously the universities teach the exact opposite, which is that people should learn to love their mind-forged manacles and to conform for the sake of power and money, for applause and likes and clicks and preferment, but that’s because the universities are so thoroughly ruled and corrupted by the most primitive, childish, and shallow impulses.
I’ve spent years following progressive arguments on these subjects, and I can assure you that, at least within the framework of their ideology and morality, they have solid rebuttals to all of those points (though, to be fair, some of these rely on the intellectual dirty trick of placing one into a corner where any further argument for one’s side will make one into a pariah – which is that meta-level protection I was talking about.) For example:
1. You say that knowledge is worth pursuing, but what you really mean is that knowledge of the Truth is worth pursuing. False, erroneous, inaccurate, or bigoted “knowledge” is negative, and spreading knowledge of untruths – encouraging belief in lies – is usually harmful. If someone tries to learn some geography on the internet and comes to “know” that the Earth is flat, that have negative, not positive, value. Likewise, true speech is good, but false or harmful or hurtful speech is bad. There are of course some areas of genuine uncertainty where a healthy and vigorous debate should be encouraged and minority viewpoints tolerated and allowed a platform to make their case in a respectful and courteous manner. But there are other areas where the debate is over and the arc of history has definitively settled some moral absolute truths for good – for example, that slavery and racism are evil – and there is absolutely nothing to be gained by continuing to tolerate debates on the subject, and, quite the contrary, such debates give off a false sense of equivalence or legitimacy, and can only lead some gullible or evil types down an evil road. In these circumstances, some form of censorship – whether state or social – is clearly warranted, and indeed, morally compulsory. There is absolutely no possible defense of the possible positive value of hate speech, and you have not made one. Go ahead, tell me, I dare you, and be specific: why should we debate slavery?
2. You accuse progressives of tribal, contextual, or social thinking, but actually, it is progressives arguing from abstract, universal principles of morality, justice, and empirical science, and we can observe that the advocates of “free speech for its own sake” almost all belong to privileged groups in the society as a sham to propagate their particular and thoroughly discredited viewpoints, so they can pursue their ulterior motive of a vile political agenda. They try to cloak themselves in the discussin of “principle” as a fallback because they know full well they cannot possibly defend the value of things like hate speech or racism on the merits. Indeed, many of those advocating for free speech are either agents of, or useful idiots for, resentful racists who are trying to defend their privileged status and position in our oppresive and supremacist system against the threat of change in the direction of social justice that progressivism represents.
the arc of history has definitively settled some moral absolute truths for good
Like many people who have studied moral philosophy, I have come to the conclusion that there are no objective moral truths. The fact that many who study moral philosophy come to this conclusion is itself a strong argument; objective truths are by definition truths that all reasonable people can apprehend with sufficient study.
The arc of history always favors contemporary thought. History soon arcs a little further and some other ideas take the spotlight.
Accordingly, I don’t hold “justice” as a core value. Different people can understand the same set of facts and come to different conclusions about what is just; nearly all of politics is exactly that.
However, there are objective truths about the physical world, which includes human beings and their wiggly little genes. Understanding those objective truths is likely to allow a measure of control, and also to grant a measure of serenity as we learn to accept the limits of our control. I consider that understanding valuable.
You could depress a baby at a circus, Handle.
On the one hand, I completely agree with Shermer’s principles. On the other hand, the current President is a flimflam man/ reality TV star/ professional wrestling villain. I can’t bring myself to muster much confidence that the pursuit of truth is particularly relevant to the struggles of politics, nor that most people have any but the most instrumental interest in truth.