Freedom of speech on life support
An earmark of the decay of wisdom, civility, and civil society in the United States
Civilization was born when the first human reflected, “I could be wrong.”
That humility was the foundation of critical thinking and truth (always provisional) emerging from a free marketplace of ideas.
But freedom of speech and thought confront a thousand mile an hour headwind: namely, the craving of the species for absolute certainties no matter how wrong to avoid the burden of thinking, deliberating, reading, writing, and searching for truth without ulterior motives. Much easier to mindlessly worship the armored knight. Indeed, pointless death is commonly preferred to critical thinking. Remember the famous lines in Lord Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, “Ours is not to reason why/ Ours is but to do and die.”
Socrates was sentenced to death because he refused to renounce critical thinking and asking “why” before “how.” He lectured his Athenian jury, “"Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy," i.e., if it’s the right thing to do, do it without hesitation or concern with self. Socrates told his effete Athenian jury without result, “I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living.”
Thomas Jefferson established the University of Virginia “based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate an error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” Jefferson also avowed, “I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
John Stuart Mill in On Liberty pleads against any circumscription of free speech because truth will atrophy unless challenged by contrarieties including falsehoods which compels truth to demonstrate with reason why they are unpersuasive. Mill elaborated:
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
The pandemic of hysterical academic and public censorship of Palestinian viewpoints over the Israeli government’s merciless war in Gaza precipitated by the Hamas October 7th atrocities is both appalling and alarming. It is a throwback to McCarthyism when any person voicing any view but categorical condemnation of Communism including naming names was ostracized, stigmatized, and ruined in their professional careers. It is a throwback to the antagonism towards abolitionists prior to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. A Boston mob threatened to tar and feather journalist William Lloyd Garrison in 1835 for his anti-slavery speech.
Freedom of speech does its best work in protecting speech that we hate. Justice William O. Douglas elaborated in Terminiello v. Chicago (1949), “A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”
Moreover, what may seem true today may not seem so tomorrow. Schopenhauer observed, “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
All we have to fear from Palestinian viewpoints is fear itself. We should welcome them, debate them, and adopt them if they are convincing. Elite universities like Harvard, Penn, MIT, and Columbia should be ashamed of their intellectual cravenness in striking Faustian bargains with fat cat donors. Are they different from the watchdog that retreats to the kennel when danger appears?
Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson warned in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”
We dare not fail to heed his warning.