Years ago, I used to give my students the example of three men standing on the courthouse steps. The first man is attempting to burn the American flag, the second is trying to stop the first man from burning the flag, and the third man is trying to stop the second man from preventing the first man from burning the flag.
“Now,” I would ask my class. “Which man is defending the constitution?”
Thankfully, most of my students knew that the third man is the one defending the ideals of our constitution, as he is protecting the first man’s right to free speech. While many of us might sympathize with the second man and deplore the act of burning our nation’s flag, the right of free speech is among the basic rights that our flag represents.
If we are to have free speech, it means that even speech we find truly objectionable must also be protected. We must allow even speech that we hate, if we are to have any right to express our opinions freely.
While most of us understand this, I have noticed among some of my more conservative friends some hesitation to equate flag burning with free speech. I, too, feel uncomfortable with the idea. It reminds me of that apocryphal tale of the priest who was asked to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the tragedy of infant mortality. “Sometimes,” the priest answered. “God must officially condone actions that he privately abhors.” So it is with free speech.
Unfortunately, a few of my friends on the left have the same problem.
I remember going to a bookstore with a colleague and being somewhat amazed at her reaction to a display of popular history books written by a conservative television personality. Clearly outraged, she placed other books in front of each of the editions, effectively hiding them. This same person would have been horrified at a library’s banning books, she regularly lectured about Nazi book burning, and she would have been outraged at being compared with either group, but she was, nevertheless, personally preventing people from reading some books just because she disagreed with the opinions of the author.
Note. Without going into too much detail, I will admit that the books were phenomenally poor history books. At the request of a friend, I read one of the books and had returned it with so many corrections and explanations scribbled along the margins that it might have been easier to just have written my own edition. The author had clearly done his research in such a manner as to only include the data that reinforced his preconceived and frequently erroneous opinions. My friend should have hidden the books because they were crap, not because of the politics of the author.
Somehow, censorship has become acceptable as long as you are doing it for a “good cause”. Social media bans or “fact checks” opinions “they” disagree with. A friend of mine had a piece consisting entirely of a paragraph taken from Wikipedia fact-checked on Facebook—with a paragraph almost identical with the original post—because Facebook claimed the author was “punching down”.
Outrageously rude, but the speech of a boor still sounds like speech to me.
MailChimp, the service that handles marketing and mass mailings for organizations and companies, has started cancelling accounts if they don’t like what is being emailed through their service. Though every piece of email they send out has a mandatory “unsubscribe” button, they are evidently reading everyone’s email and passing judgement on what meets their standards. One of the groups that they have recently blocked specialized in political satire. According to MailChimp, "Indeed, humor can be an effective mode of communicating hateful ideas."
MailChimp, Facebook, Twitter and the rest are private companies, and they can refuse to do business with people if they don’t want to, though I’m just not sure why they would feel any need or desire to do so. I will admit that if I were the president of MailChimp and the KKK wanted to open an account, I would have to consider the proposition for a long time, but in the end, even hate speech is still speech.
Brandeis University has a panel of twits that have come up with a long list of words they no longer want their students to use. “Trigger warning” invokes a mental image of a gun, so Brandeis wants faculty and students to say “content note”. The list of banned words also includes “victim, survivor, freshman, picnic”, and the phrase “Ladies and Gentlemen”. “People of Color” is wrong, so you should instead use “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color). “Walk-In” is too “Ableist”, and these Speech Nazis suggest the substitution of “Drop-In”. This insults me because it suggests that some people can fly and I can’t.
My favorite banned phrase on the list is “rule of thumb”. According to Brandeis, this is because of the widely held belief that the phrase refers to an old English law that allowed a husband to beat his wife with a stick no larger than his thumb. Brandeis worded this so carefully that they obviously know that no such law ever existed. The true source of the phrase dates back to the 17th Century when brewers tested the temperature of beer by sticking their thumbs into the vat.
Using Google and searching through the last twelve years of this blog, I found that I have used well over half of the banned words. I promise that, in the years to come, I will use the rest.
I don’t know when it became fashionable, or even acceptable, to censor the speech of others, but we need to stop. As we restrict language, ban opinions, and cancel the thoughts of even the fringe, we water down the value of the remaining opinions. After all, no one is punching down as much as the person who says “Shut up!”
Besides, if only one opinion is allowed, what makes you think it will be yours?
Nicely done, Mark. You are right about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, et al being private companies, but they do enjoy special government protection. They are classified as "platforms" which means the person who posts on them is responsible for the content and not the platform. This protects these "private" companies from lawsuits for slander and libel. The trouble comes when they start curating content due to its political slant. Once they do that, they become a "publisher" because they are determining what content is acceptable and what is not. Like a with a newspaper, magazine or news outlet, the reader/viewer knows going in that there is a slant to a publisher's content, whatever they might mumble about being unbiased. A century ago it was very clear whether a newspaper was Republican or Democrat was often proclaimed on the masthead - much more honest to my way of thinking.
ReplyDeleteEvery historian, commentator, and politician chooses what he or she (or whatever) chooses to tell readers. We learned how to make an ostensibly unbiased news story lean in the direction the reporter wants it to lean, simply by adding extra of what proves the point and leaving out bits that challenge the notion the reporter or the editor or the publisher wants to promote in the story.
I think Facebook and the rest are publishers and should be vulnerable to slander/libel lawsuits if they are going to curate content for political, religious or philosophical content. Obscenity, pornography and gratuitous violence, okay. I could give them that, but religion, philosophy, opinion and politics are protected under free speech I believe, including my failure to use the Oxford comma in that list. I only use that when it might cause confusion not to and if someone wants to argue with me about it, they can turn me in to Facebook for my inconsistent use of serial commas. That argument is a lot more likely to be productive than one about how I'm being disrespectful to the president by calling him "China" Joe. They were arguing the opposite side of the free speech argument last year, the year before, the year before that and all the months after the 2016 election. (see what I did there). ;-)