Free Speech

 There is a certain sort of Old School Liberal pundit who has been beating the drums against the tendency of academic institutions in particular from restricting mildly controversial speech. My general feeling was, "OK, I see your point, but is that really the most pressing issue right now?"

The rhetorical conflagration over the Israeli-Hamas War has actually validated a lot of their concerns. As someone who has been engaged a bit with this as an academic, I've been skeptical of the idea of "trauma" or "harm" from speech which might be controversial. I never had a problem with the judicious use of "trigger warnings" because those would simply warn someone that the short story or primary source that they were about to read might have a reference to abuse. No need to blindside someone. The idea, however, that perhaps I shouldn't assign primary sources that use the N-word strikes me as poor history. You need to look that square in the face.

More broadly, as Jon Chait and Matthew Yglesias have argued, this moment has seen a certain shift against the more left wing advocates for speech codes and restrictions, as they advocate for Palestinians. Having shut down certain topics or voices, now they are the ones being "silenced". In a more reflective moment, this would suggest a return to what Yglesias calls "principled free speech". Sure, maybe you can restrict actual Nazis from speaking, but advocating for a Palestinian state is not Nazism we shouldn't make that leap. 

About 15 years ago, there was a movement in academia to prioritize "grit" as a form of character education that transcended and even lay the groundwork for other success. One reason why student-athletes tend to succeed after graduation is that athletics is very clearly about "grit" - hard work, overcoming adversity and navigating setbacks. In an academic climate where we prioritize sanitizing speech to a degree that some schools are doing, we rob students of having to wrestle with difficult questions.  The very point of free speech is to provoke thought. 

A few years back, the school brought in a speaker who said, "Sweatshops are good, actually." It was intentionally provocative, as the speaker's point was that textiles and garment work is, in fact, the first step in economically development. Citizens of poor countries actually choose to work in what we would consider tough working conditions, because it still beats trying to eek a living of subsistence farming. The provocation of that talk may have been a bit upsetting from a student from, say, Thailand or Vietnam. At the same time, it prompted debate and introspection.

Simply making an outlandish claim - performative trolling - is not the goal of free speech. Even free speech advocates do not countenance threatening speech - or rather physically threatening speech. You should absolutely "threaten" your audience's ideas. 

We have, at the moment, a public discourse that it poisoned by trolling - performatively outlandish statements. What this does to non-trolls is make them dismissive of most challenging forms of speech. Was the "Sweatshops are good, actually" guy a troll? No, but you could easily mistake him for one. Secondly, the ubiquity of trolls prompts people to take positions and defend them without really engaging in the counterargument, because the counterargument is not being made in good faith.

My father and I would argue hammer and tongs over any damned thing. Because we loved each other, we could get heated but never resentful. Hell, he tried to argue about the deficit on his literal death bed. What we have created in our schools is a climate where you can't have controversial discussions. It stems from an online environment (which our kids know too well) poisoned by trolling and by an expansion of the idea of "harm" to include things which are really just discomfiting. 

My hope is the fact that these things come in waves, and perhaps the rhetorical venom that has been unleashed over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will lead to some people opening up to more guardrails to actually allow free speech. Or maybe - as with so many other things - the heated online environment has broken something irreparably. If so, we will be poorer for it.