Free Speech: Why the *Philosophy* Matters [Open College transcript]

Topics and Times:

• What a meaningful life requires: [00:00 — 03:31]
• Far left and far right on metaphysics, human nature, and ethics [03:31 — 10:35]
  • Walt Whitman quotation [09:28 — 10:35]
• Why the authoritarian left [10:35 — 13:53]
• Advertisement: StephenHicks.org [13:53 — 14:46]
• How we got to where we are now [14:46 — 45:19]
  • The development of modern liberal education [14:46 — 25:26]
    • Galileo Galilei on truth and reason [15:34 — 19:05]
    • Francis Bacon and the need to train our own minds [19:05 — 20:58]
    • John Locke and the need for tolerance [20:58 — 22:07]
    • John Stuart Mill and the value of debate [22:07 — 23:58]
  • Advertisement: Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault [25:26 — 27:23]
  • Free Speech *Is* Free Thought *Is* Free Action [27:23 — 41:57]
    • Language and cognition [27:23 — 29:16]
    • On the individuality of cognition [29:16 — 33:44]
    • On speech-and-action needs of cognition [33:44 — 39:47]
    • Advertisement: Adventures in Postmodernism tour in Australia [39:47 — 41:20]
  • The responsibility of teachers, professors, and parents [41:57 — 45:19]
• What happens when free speech suppressed [45:19 — 50:49]
• Outro: [50:49 — 52:14]

Total: 52:14.

Transcription

Free Speech: Why the *Philosophy* Matters

Let’s start by thinking about what a meaningful life requires. We human beings are smart beings—or potentially smart. We are not instinctual creatures or passive creatures. For us to make a go of our lives, it requires a lot of active engagement with the world and really deep thinking. We have to formulate our life goals and a strategy for realizing them. All of that requires lots of information, lots of experimenting. And it is a do-it-yourself project.

If we extend that to meaningful relationships and social values, for our relationships to be meaningful, we have to find and discover that we have shared values. There are degrees of intimacy from business acquaintances, friends, lovers, life partners, and so on. But in common, for all of those relationships to be valuable and meaningful depends on exchanges of information, genuine communication. All of that has to happen within a context of trust that has to be created, a context of respect that also has to be created and earned, and above all freedom: we have to be able to enter into relationships by our choice and exit those relationships when they are just not working out. Even when they are going to work out, disagreements are going to arise, so we have to have a context in which there is at least an initial benefit of the doubt and we know that we are going to give and get that. A willingness to hear out the other side, and a nuanced judgment that, before we condemn someone or blame them, or excuse them, we will take all of the available information into account.

All of that is about the cognitive demands upon humans beings. We are smart. And if we are going to think deeply about our lives and all of our important values, we have to recognize that it’s a complicated process — and that’s a major part of what education should instill in us.

I think that is precisely why we now have deep, deep concerns over current educational and broadly intellectual-cultural trends where the opposite of everything I’ve just said seems to be on the rise: An increase in the amount of distrust, disrespect, and in some cases explicit attacks on freedom.

The standard, old-fashioned threats are still there nationwide and worldwide. There are plenty of traditional authoritarian forces; often they’re on the so-called conservative side or the so-called right end of some spectrum. And plenty of those people are willing to intimidate, suppress, and override free speech.

But it does seem that we have a new generational threat that this time is coming especially from the authoritarian left. And there is a question about why that is.

Talking about the authoritarian Left and the authoritarian Right, I do want to flag and the outset one theme of this series — of the Open College Podcast series — that almost always on important issues (applied and philosophical) there are three positions that need to be taken into account, not two.

We always have to be wary of binaries. There are important political, religious, and philosophical binaries, but there is only a small number of them. And the false alternatives that we are typically presented with outnumber them by a big margin, and they do come in many forms.

Depending on where you are in the world right now, the worst threats might be coming to you from right-wing, conservative, authoritarian ideologies. Or if you are in a different part of the world or in a different institutional context, they might be coming from left-wing authoritarians. And it is often worth pointing out — however right and left authoritarians might seem opposed to each other — they often share some more basic common premises that put both of them in opposition to genuine liberals. And those of us who are genuine liberals are often irritated that we are forced to choose between some sort of right-wing “ism” or some sort of left-wing “ism”.

If we look at the debates over speech, we can see a pattern. Because the false alternatives come at us in many philosophical forms. We can look at the philosophical groundings for authoritarians of the right and the left. Typically conservatives, if they are strong religious conservatives, will say we need metaphysically to appeal to some higher truths, perhaps to some divine revelations. And some people and some institutions have special access to those higher truths, and that gives them the right to impose their “truths” on the rest of us. Metaphysically people at the far-left end of the authoritarian spectrum will say, “No, no, no. We don’t believe in any of that nonsense. What we call reality is just this subjectively/socially created context of belief.” But you’ll find them also arguing that some individuals are especially “woke.” Or that they have been trained in critical theory, and, as a result, they have special insight into what is really going on. And that “wokeness” and special training give them the right to impose their beliefs authoritarianly on the rest of us. So even though it seems that the far-left and the far-right have different and opposed metaphysics, both of those metaphysics are used against those who favor liberal approaches to speech and communication.

The argument might be over human nature. Again: the far-right and the far-left have different accounts here. Some very strong religious accounts assert the collective sin, collective responsibility, forcing a notion of collective salvation: We all need to unite together and face our Creator or the Ultimate Judge of the universe. That means that deviants, or individuals who disbelieve or challenge, are undermining the salvation of the group. So they need to be dealt with. If we go to the other end of the spectrum, the far-left one, there we will see often non-religious notions of salvation. But nonetheless, they share the idea of collective identity and argue that what human beings need is solidarity with their groups. So if you are a dissenter and you challenge the dominant beliefs of some collective identity, you will be labeled a “race-traitor” or, in the case of gender and sex issues (i.e., if you are a woman who deviates from some forms of feminist lines), you are betraying “false consciousness” and sabotaging the cause of women everywhere. So again, there is a collectivism that underlies the willingness to impose on individuals who deviate — just on this theme of what it is to be a human being, even though far-right and far-left seem to have different understandings of what that is.

Or if we look more specifically at ethical issues: Where do we get our moral values from and what status do those have? We will often, if we go to the far-right conservative end of the spectrum, say there are certain moral values that are just beyond question. There are absolute religious truths that we should just accept. And therefore, it is unconscionable blasphemy to challenge any of those beliefs. And we know how we should deal with blasphemers. But then if we go to the far-authoritarian left, they also will say there are certain moral values that are absolutely beyond question. We will put them under the label of “social justice,” which functions as an axiomatic set of beliefs. And it is just unconscionable “hate speech” for anyone to challenge those in any fundamental way.

The point is that the far-left and the far-right, if we can use those labels now, will disagree metaphysically and about human nature. They will disagree about ethics. But nonetheless, when the rubber meets the road, both of them deny the individual’s needs and responsibility to evaluate the facts of the world and decide what values he/she is going to adopt as an individual using his/her own judgment.

I’m reminded here of the poet Walt Whitman, who was a genuine liberal. I like his quotation where he advised us: “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul” (Leaves of Grass). “Your own soul” — that is your own individual judgment. Notice that he is saying you are not necessarily going to reject. The idea is that we can learn from people on the left, people on the right, or whoever the current authorities are in our generation. But the important point is that each of us, as individuals, needs to re-examine and see it for ourselves, to see it with your own eyes.

Liberalism in the Walt Whitman’s spirit has often been challenged by the authoritarian right, but it seems now in Western academic and intellectual life that much more challenge is coming from the authoritarian left. That raises the question: Why is that?

Why the authoritarian left?

Let me give a cheap answer: The left, especially the far-left, lost a lot of debates over the 20th century. The left does bill itself as being primarily concerned with poverty, racism, sexism — broadly equality issues. And they have a particular understanding of what causes poverty, racism, sexism, and a set of recommendations of how we are supposed to solve those problems. So we have big debates over those issues, debates in specifically economic theory and practice, and all of us are aware of the huge debates over affirmative action as a potential tool for overcoming racism, sexism, and so on. But the fact is that in the 20th century and on into the 21st century, starting even earlier — in the Age of Enlightenment, we have made astoundingly great progress in combating poverty, sexism, and racism. But it is not because we adopted any of the communistic, socialistic, or far-left proposed solutions or because we implemented vigorous affirmative action programs. Instead, the credit for the achievements that we have made in combating poverty and all of those negative “isms” goes to genuinely liberal and free-market capitalist philosophies. The ones that have emphasized entrepreneurial achievement, respect for individual merit and individual freedom. It is precisely to the extent these views have been adopted that we have gotten rid of the old-fashioned problems.

So the credit does not go to the far-left ideologies: Communism and socialism have been failures everywhere they have been tried, and affirmative action has been pretty widely rejected, even though we give it a respectful hearing and look at its debates. But one thing that we know about people who are ideologists primarily is that when one loses a debate, it’s tempting to change the terms that underlie that debate. So for example, if you’re losing at chess, in your frustration you knock over the board and or you claim that the rules of chess are biased or unfair.

That might be a cheap answer, but I think it does capture part of the explanation — that the far left knows that it lost a lot of debates, but nonetheless, it is not rejecting its own ideology or engaging in serious self-examination. Instead, it doubles down on a losing ideology and simply adopts more ruthless tactics. And that is part of what is going on.

I think that is an explanation of lesser importance. And it is of lesser importance because over the last two generations the authoritarian left has won another debate—a philosophical debate over the nature of knowledge, truth, language, and power. That takes us into a serious philosophical territory. And the claim I am going to make is that the left has lost some debates, very significant ones, in politics, economics—social philosophy more broadly speaking. But it does has some powerful philosophical tools on its side and those need to be looked at.

How did we get where we are now?

Our modern Liberal Education context came out of debates in the early modern world. Part of the authoritarian left, or the authoritarian-leaning left, is currently reacting to liberal education context. Which is itself a reaction to an early conservative or far-right authoritarian context. The highlights are embodied in all of the famous names we associate with free thinking. These are the deep thinkers — in many cases courageous individuals who carved out the philosophical and intellectual space within which what we call the modern liberal education ideal came into existence.

So we harken back to someone like Galileo Galilei, who was maturely working in science and philosophy of science in the early 1600s. And what’s important to remember in Galileo’s context is that when he was a younger intellectual, Giordano Bruno had been found guilty of heresy and killed. Killed legally by the Inquisition and with the authority of Catholic Church behind it for advocating what were seen as heretical scientific theories. Galileo was cautioned by this, as were thousands of other intellectuals around the world. Given that the Church is a political force (this is prior to the separation of church and state), as well as being a social force, a moral force, and an institutionalized religious force, so one had to be careful.

But what makes Galileo important was his willingness to stand up and say: If we are genuinely interested in the truth, the important thing is that individuals need to use their own reason; not simply to consult old books that have been handed down through tradition and agree that certain authoritative institutions can claim a monopoly on interpretation. Now, Galileo is going to argue, as a good Catholic, that Scripture is authoritative as long as it stays in its proper zone. And that the clergy and the theologians who are being trained in the authoritative institutions do have an expertise that needs to be respected and so forth.

But Galileo’s argument is that God gave each individual human being sense organs, the capacity to perceive the world, the capacity to think about the world. And that what God wants us to do is to use our minds to understand — not only the Book of Scripture — but also the Book of Nature. God wrote two Books, and those Books have different rhetorical purposes that they are trying to achieve, and sometimes significantly different audiences in mind. So what we need to do is understand that God wants us to study the natural world using our God-given intellectual talents to do so. But people who are using their minds to do the experiments, to observe the natural world, and to reason on the basis of it are not being anti-religious in doing so. And it is, in fact, a form of heresy or blasphemy if we start to use authoritative, institutional intimidation methods to try to get people unthinkingly to accept a certain interpretation of how the world works.

We know that Galileo over the course of a couple of decades was in a very awkward position, but he had the courage to argue back against what was then the most powerful institution in the Western world. And while eventually he was silenced, nonetheless the arguments that he made did prevail and provided intellectual ammunition for a generation or two of intellectual freethinkers and scientists to go on and do the kind of work Galileo was doing in his time. So what Galileo is arguing is that the individual, each of us, has the capacity to observe the world and think for ourselves. And this is fundamentally a responsibility that we all bear.

Another contemporary of Galileo’s is the English thinker Francis Bacon. Bacon agrees broadly with the spirit of Galileo’s empirical and rational philosophy. But the importance of Bacon, in this context, is that reason is not only a capacity of studying the world — it is a capacity that, in the first place, has to be trained. And each of us, if we are going to be properly educated, needs to take on a responsibility of training our own minds. We always are, given the ways our minds work psychologically, tempted to engage in certain shortcuts; that we are sometimes willing to take our own narrow experience and generalize inappropriately from it. Or we are interested in taking shortcuts in a form of letting our peer-groups, or the weight of authority say: Well, lots of people seem to think this, or various authoritative institutions seem to think this, so I will accept it. And that is a shortcut as well. All of us are always going to be fighting against what Bacon calls these idols that are built into, perhaps, our psychological framework. But each of us, in our proper self-education, in training our minds to be the effective tools that they can be, needs to take on this battle of crafting our rational capacity into having the ability to figure out the truths as they really are.

So combining Galileo with Bacon we get the idea that yes, experience and reason are important and able to understand the world. But experience and reason, as psychological capacities themselves, need vigilantly to be trained. And we always need to be on guard against creeping bias in our own thinking, if as individuals we are going to achieve this level of rational capacity and truth.

In the next generation, John Locke extends this to social issues. If we are going to take the quest for truth seriously and we recognize that each individual has the capacity and the responsibility for seeking the truth and figuring out what really is good in the world, then necessarily socially this is going to require that we are tolerant. Because the world is complicated, and we know if we leave it up to the individuals to go off and explore the world intellectually on their own, they are going to come up with lots of different hypotheses. They are going to make commitments to all sorts of different kinds of beliefs. And if the important point is individual responsibility, individual judgment of truth, then socially we each have to respect the fact that the other person has a right to differ in their belief. We do not have to respect the belief, but we have to respect their right to have that belief and to follow their own path. And that means, institutionally and socially, we should have a very deep respect for intellectual diversity. We need to institutionalize it both in ourselves and in the institutions we create.

John Stuart Mill, jumping a century and a half or so, another great liberal thinker, extends this argument even further. My understanding of Mill’s unique contribution is to say: Locke is right, Bacon is right, Galileo is right in all of those points, but we need to have on the social side the view that in addition to seeing other people as intellectual rivals when they disagree with us, we should not merely tolerate them, but actively seek out their different views. Because our seeking our their different views benefits us. We might be smart individuals, we might have thought a lot about various things. But chances are good that we have not thought of everything, and we might have not the best arguments for the beliefs that we hold, even if our beliefs are true. So the only way we are going to find this out is by putting our beliefs to the test. That is to say: giving the other side or the other sides of the debate a fair hearing. And what we might find is, in fact, they have some part of the truth packaged into their belief system. Maybe I don’t accept their belief overall, but there are some elements of truth that they are emphasizing. And their emphasizing them will highlight to me things I might have overlooked and therefore need to incorporate into my own belief system. Of course, what their criticism of my current belief system will do for me is point our any weaknesses that it currently has. And it can only strengthen me. So, in addition to tolerating widespread belief, I should actively seek out a diversity of opinions and actively test my beliefs against them. And that is a socially win-win process.

Now that model — integrating the Galileo position about the important of reason and experiment, Bacon’s point about the importance of each of us taking on our own psychological biases and temptations to take shortcuts, Locke’s emphasis on diversity and social tolerance, and Mill’s seeing the clash of ideas as a socially win-win process that we should all embrace — came to form what we consider the modern liberal education context. And that is to say, liberal education is about the pursuit of truth, but it is about the rational pursuit of truth. This is a responsibility that each individual bears. And that the only way the individual can get self-respect and proper social dignity is by engaging in this process to the best of his/her ability. Social respect and social benevolence should be built into the process in order to make it work not only for each of us as individuals but for our societies more broadly.

This model prevailed after the course of many generations and, in some cases, many centuries of battles — tooth-and-nail battles against traditional conservative forces (and I mean literally tooth and nail, as many early liberal thinkers did have their teeth and nails yanked out under torture) — and became our modern liberal education context.

Free Speech *Is* Free Thought *Is* Free Action

Embodied in that conception of liberal education is a philosophical view about the nature of language: Language is a tool of cognition and communication. But that epistemological and linguistic theory about what language is and how it works and what makes it valuable is itself subject to philosophical controversy.

In my own thinking, this portion I sub-headed Free Speech *Is* Free Thought *Is* Free Action. To emphasize that there is an integration between speech, thought, and action. That is a rhetorical overstatement, but I am using it, in my own thinking, for rhetorical purposes to highlight the importance of integration of thought with speech with actions. And that is a philosophically charged set of claims.

When we get to free speech debates, when we talk about cognition and communication, it is going to be important that we see that language (that is, the vehicle that we use for cognition and communication) be primarily individual in nature. That is one point to stress. And that the language requires a kind of integration between abstract theory and particular practice. The way human cognition work is by a very complex interaction of abstract and particular processes, as well as the theoretical and applied processes. This takes us into some deep territory, but this is crucial, particularly by the time we get to far-left’s and especially postmodern left’s attacks on free speech where the real battleground is.

First, let’s focus on the individuality. Typically and for very good reasons, the defenders of free speech emphasize the social aspects. John Locke and the followers of Locke emphasize that free speech is important in part because trying to suppress it is almost completely useless. Free speech, when it is suppressed, does not really change anybody’s mind. Instead, people just secretly go on believing whatever that is they are going to believe. They might mouth the appropriate words if the authorities force them to do so. But that does not change anyone’s mind. So political authoritarianism of any sort is useless.

John Stuart Mill is emphasizing the social needs of learning. That we really have to understand and hear from the intellectual opposition. Otherwise, even if we believe true things, we only have the second-best or third-rate understanding of why those things are true.

It is true that free speech is an important social need and it is one that should have, in my judgment, absolute political protection. But the important thing is that it is a need of individual minds. And the reason for that is because thinking requires integration: We have to think, we have to externalize our thinking in speech, externalize our thinking and speech in action, try things out in the world, and we also have to take the results of our trying things out in the world as data that feeds back into our thinking. So there is no way, if we are genuinely interested in human cognition, to isolate speech as some sort of secret thing that goes on in the privacy of your own minds and has no implications in the world. Free speech does require speech, it requires action. So there is a robust set of rights that needs to be respected and implemented here.

If we take language, for example — and I want next to emphasize the individuality of it — it is a common thesis that language is a social product. The argument is true in one sense: language is importantly social. But it is not primarily social. It is true that language exists before any one of us is born, so we are born into a language culture. It is also true that we are all taught language in a social context, usually first from our parents. But despite those two facts, language is primarily an individual function.

Here I sometimes make an analogy to riding a bicycle. It is true that bikes were made by other people long before any of us are born. It is also true that when you learn to ride a bike, it is almost always because you are taught to use it by others. Maybe you see other people riding a bike, and they inspire you to go ahead and try to. Maybe it is more hands-on with your mom or dad or older sibling. They will model riding for you and encourage you. But the important thing about bike-riding is that it is something you do yourself. And it is for yourself. Bike-riding happens when you, as an individual, make a commitment to it. You have to let go of any supports that are around you. You have to push off from the ground by yourself. You have to press the pedals. You have to steer the bike yourself. You have to go in the direction that you have chosen. The same thing holds with language, and that is the argument I’m making here. Like a bicycle, language is a tool, but we use it ourselves, as individuals, primarily. We have to initiate the process. We have to use the language to guide our thinking, to take it in the direction we want to go. We have to push and steer the language in the direction we have chosen. So that is the individuality of the process: language is primarily something that individuals use as a tool to understand the world for themselves.

When they are engaging in communication acts, the individual has to initiate the language. The person who is receiving the language has to initiate the process of listening/reading/interpreting the language signs and processing it in his/her individual mind. Even the social element and the social use of language requires the individual functioning of the two minds that are involved.

Secondly, I want to emphasize a point about integration. That free speech is based on needs of cognition. That cognition can only happen (that might be a bit strong) and best happen in a context where the free speech is the operative social principle. Each of us has this happy responsibility of developing our minds, keeping them fit, keeping our minds healthy, just as we have the same responsibility of keeping our bodies fit, keeping our bodies healthy.

But the ways our minds work — and, as far as we know, much of this is distinctive to human cognition — is by a complicated interplay of particular elements and abstractions that we form by a process of concept-formation. We have a very powerful mind that enables us to put things into abstract categories. But if we get very abstract and we never tie our abstractions back to the particulars, then it is easy to get lost in thought, or for our thought to become overly rationalistic and to lose actual connection to concrete particular reality. So what thinking requires, especially abstract thinking, is a connecting to particulars — particular entities in the world, the particular concretes that gives rise to concepts and then gives them meaning.

The second and closely related point is that when we are thinking — we do have a powerful mind — but there is so much one can hold in one’s mind at any given time. Sometimes this is given the nickname of the “crow-epistemology,” because crows’ minds, when they were studied, were found to have a limited number of particular entities that the crows could attend to at a given point. And the same is true of human beings. If we just attend to particular objects or particular mental entities that we are considering, we can only hold so many of them at that time. Perhaps, five, six, or seven if we are concentrating very hard. But reality is complicated and oftentimes we need to keep track of more than five, six, or seven things. So we need memory tools and memory aids to enable us, in connection with the things we are actively considering, nonetheless, have the other objects that we need to attend to within cognitive grasp easily enough — some sort of memory aid.

The third thing is that much of our thinking requires that we integrate what we are considering currently with our background knowledge. All of us will have thousands and thousands of items of background information that we want to recall and have available to us to consult when we are thinking about whatever particular things that we are doing right now. And that means that we need to have long-term memory aids: books, for example, or hard drives where we have stored lots of information that we can call up when we need it.

The fourth thing is that we need, when we are thinking, actually to try out objects of knowledge — hypotheses that we are considering, for example — in the real world. Sometimes the only way we can — often, rather, the only way — we can figure out whether something really is true or whether it really is reliable is by doing experiments. And experimenting is a form of acting in the world. So cognition requires experimenting; there is no way that we can just retreat to our philosophers’ armchairs. Actually, that gives philosophers a bad reputation, but sometimes it is true as a cliché, I know. By that [philosopher’s armchair] method, we tune out the world and, without actually engaging with the world experimentally, try to figure out the truth about it — and that is just not possible.

What this means is if we are interested in thinking — and of course, we are interested in thinking, since thinking is the only we can get the truth — it’s the only way we can figure out what is good, important, reasonable, probabilistic and so forth — is that our thinking requires embodiment. It has to be embodied in concrete language, in words, in spoken words, in written words — that is to say, free thought requires the freedom to externalize our thoughts in a particular form: in speech, in text, or by means of signs. If we are not allowed to do that, then our cognitive ability is dramatically impaired.

It also means that our thinking requires freedom of action: we have to be able to go out into the world and try out our ideas to see which ones work. That means we need a lot of trial-and-error. Sometimes the trial-and-error is a matter of debating with other people to put our ideas to a social test. Or experimenting in physical reality — that is to say that both of them are kinds of action.

So, the point that I am making that both individually and socially freedom of thought does not exist only as some isolated, abstracted, disconnected thing from speech, from action, from the rest of the world. Rather, freedom of thought necessarily includes, if it is to be effective, freedom of speech, freedom of the press (socially), and the liberty of action.

The point I am stressing here is about epistemology and about language. But what my individualistic point implies is that if we get philosophies that are fundamentally not individualistic, or that in some deep way they separate the needs of thought from the needs of speech from the needs of action from the needs of concretization — that what we will find is that those deep philosophies will also end up not seeing the importance of free speech. And sometimes they will actively oppose it.

To say that Free Speech *Is* Free Thought *Is* Free Action is a rhetorical overstatement, but its purpose is to emphasize the integration of thought, speech, and action. Of course, we can think in limited ways without speaking. We can act semi-successfully in the world without engaging in fresh thinking. But fully successful human living is this ongoing process of free action guided by free thinking, and that thinking, in turn, has to be informed by the results of that action.

The responsibility of teachers, professors, and parents

This leads us directly to the responsibility of teachers and professors and parents concerned with raising their children. Our responsibility when we take on that role is ourselves to be genuine seekers of truth, goodness, and beauty. And, in turn, we are guiding and mentoring others, typically younger people, in their seeking of truth, goodness, and beauty. So what we want is for those others, whom we are teaching, to consider lots and lots of ideas, to read widely, to feel free and welcome to express their own half-formed opinions, to enter into debates, to question other people’s ideas, to be open to having their own ideas criticized, to actively try out their ideas, to do formal experiments. Because we think that’s the only way to get to the truth. The individual engages in observation, experimenting, and reasoning in an integrated fashion.

Now we are all familiar with those people who, unfortunately, discourage some or all of those activities. People who are indoctrinators. They have their agenda, they have their beliefs, they have their so-called truths. When they get positions of superiority or authority, they use that power in totally irresponsible ways: They give biased education, biased presentations. They present only one side of positions on issues that they know are controversial and that there are very good viewpoints on other sides out there. Or who engage in some sort on intellectual, social, or even political intimidation. In my view, those people are intellectual cowards. At a minimum, they are abusers of their power. Good teachers inform; they model, they coach.

But we do face now, in the recent generations, some newer enemies of free speech. They are not old-fashioned indoctrinators. They are precisely those who do not believe in the individual: they believe in group identities, and they typically believe that individuals who are in those groups are shaped by group forces beyond the individual’s control. They are also those who do not believe in truth or reason — those who put those words in scare quotes [“truth, “reason”] when they use them. That is to say, they are committed to some sort of deep skepticism. And that is precisely the postmodern left, and it is they who are at the root of most contemporary attacks from the left on free speech in intellectual life. They are more demographically represented among those who currently are willing to use intimidation and/or outright forceful methods to advance their particular group’s beliefs and values.

One point of this podcast is to point up the fact that the debate is philosophical. It is not primarily political, it is not primarily economic or some other social dimension. Just as liberal free speech required a philosophical defense against traditional conservative kinds of authoritarianism in the late Medieval and early modern eras, in contemporary times it requires one against contemporary postmodern leftists.

What happens when free speech suppressed

A historical reminder: We do live in a very successful culture. We have many admirable things to celebrate and to enjoy. Part of the good life is simply to be able to take for granted that you are living in a successful culture and get on with the business of enjoying everything that it makes possible for you. But it is also important to remember that there have been other successful cultures in the past that failed. And in some cases, they failed precisely on the issue we are concerned with now — a widespread failure to respect the free speech of important individuals and free speech more broadly in anybody’s individual life.

So we think of an example of Socrates. Socrates was precisely a martyr for philosophical thinking. But Socrates was not an isolated example. A pre-Socratic philosopher, a generation earlier, Anaximander, had been exiled from Athens for daring to suggest that the sun was not a god, but rather just a big rock up in the sky that was on fire. Imagine that. But Anaximander was ousted, a generation later Socrates was killed, and it is important to remember that a generation and a half later Aristotle, as tensions once again arose in Athens over various politically-charged issues, decided to leave Athens on the grounds that, as he put it, he did not want the hot-tempered politicized elements to commit another sin against philosophy. And it is not an accident that Greece’s golden age was ending precisely in the era of Aristotle. And that Greece was weakened, and its weakening was one of the reasons why it was able to be conquered successfully by the Romans.

If we jump to the late Feudal era/early Modern era, the case of Galileo is, of course, important. And there is any number of other individuals like Michael Servetus and Giordano Bruno [and William Tyndale] who were martyred and killed by religious authoritarians and other forms of conservative, anti-intellectual authoritarians who wanted to suppress free speech. And they did succeed in silencing Galileo for the last decade of his life. But it is also important to realize that that sent signals to lots of other important intellectuals. I am thinking here of René Descartes, another philosophical genius, who early in his life decided that he was going to get out of Southern Europe where the repressions were the worst and move north to Northern Europe where there was a greater degree of intellectual tolerance. And again, it is not a historical accident that Italy — which had been the seat of the Renaissance and had spawn a whole generation of university building and had attracted the best minds all from all over Europe to its universities — in the generation of and after Galileo, once the message of his silencing spread, Italy declined to second-rate status, and eventually to a third-rate one. And it was precisely England, Netherlands and other places in the north-west of Europe that had more free speech and liberal intellectual environments that became intellectually vigorous.

And, of course, the lessons just of the last one hundred years. One can make the argument that Germany was an amazing powerhouse intellectual culture with its 19th-century and early 20th-century philosophy, science, and art. But with the rise of National-Socialism and the rise of Communism there — it is always important to remember that Marxism was a German export — as those kinds of intellectual and political authoritarianisms rose to social prominence there, intellectual lives in the nations thereby affected also slowed down and silenced. As thousands and thousands of very bright freethinkers from all parts of the intellectual spectrum got out of Germany, Austria, Russia and went to the West where by-and-large liberal free speech was respected and practiced.

So the lessons of history are quite clear: The only way we are going to have a vigorous, progressive culture is by lots of individuals who are creative and brilliant. And the only way we are going to have a culture in which individuals are free to put together a happy life as they see fit is by giving people lots of scope for thinking for themselves, deciding their own values and doing their own experimenting in an atmosphere of intellectual and social tolerance. And in an atmosphere of social benevolence where we actively embrace the collision of ideas to figure out which ones really are best. Any practice of intimidation, self-exiling, and outright killing obviously ruins the cultures that have achieved some measure of greatness.

We have a great but flawed civilization. But let’s make sure, for our own sakes — the sakes of our own individual selves as well for our mutual benefit—that we do not repeat the dramatic mistakes of history. We have to learn what made us possible or possible for us to create a great civilization in the first place. And my answer is: good philosophy. We are in a philosophical battle right now and we need to know it.

Sources
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass.

Related:

• Free Speech and Postmodernism, Kindle version
• “Hitler and the Death of Free Speech”
• “The Deep Theory Behind Stifling Speech”
• “Campus Power Politics — It’s Calculated Strategy”
• Philosophy of Education Course

The complete series of Open College with Stephen Hicks podcasts.