The Morality of Free Speech, Or Lack Thereof

This is a belated response to the Blog Carnival at Censor vs. Censure, hosted by Women Write About Comics.
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Free speech isn’t a moral good.

By that I don’t mean that free speech is evil. I just mean that, in itself, free speech isn’t an ideal to strive for; supporting free speech, as an end in itself, doesn’t make you a better person.

For many who identify as comics fans, or as art fans, or as libertarians, or as some intersection of all those things, this may seem like heresy. Supporting free speech is often touted as a kind of iconic sign of open-mindedness; a stand against the philistines. Alternately, or in addition, to be against free speech is seen as supporting tyranny and that mighty argument-quashing shibboleth, Big Brother.

There’s no doubt that Orwell and his speech that was free could fling a vicious slogan, thereby making all around him shut up. But putting aside the well-worn phrases, what does or doesn’t free speech actually do? “Free speech” is not a guide for how to treat your neighbor; it doesn’t tell you how to do unto others, or how to behave with kindness, or decency. It isn’t equality or love or “do not murder”. It is a subset of freedom perhaps — but even there the ground gets murky very quickly. If freedom means freedom to speak, it surely means, to the same degree, freedom not to listen; freedom to shout in the public square must, by its nature, impinge on other people’s freedom to go about their business in peace. Why should freedom of speech trump these other kinds of freedoms? What gives it extra special moral status, so that it takes precedence over other kinds of freedoms, or over kindness, or what have you?

The answer is that there is no special moral status. What there is, is a special political status. Free speech is not a moral good, but the argument is that, in the modern community and the modern state, free speech is an invaluable tool for arriving at moral goods like equity, freedom, and happiness for all. Free speech creates a marketplace of ideas in which, the theory goes, the good ideas will gain traction and the bad will winnow away. Free speech is actually then allied as a moral good most closely not with freedom, but with truth.

This is a grand and appealing faith — but it is, still, just a faith. There’s no empirical evidence that free speech leads to truth, nor that it leads to more truth over time, nor that it creates happiness and freedom and equality, necessarily. The Bill of Rights was enshrined in a country built on slavery. The first amendment didn’t make slavery wither away either; on the contrary, slavery became if anything more entrenched over time. It was done away with not by argument, but by force of arms.

Force of arms isn’t a good in itself either, obviously. Lots of people, including me, think it’s an evil. And that’s really the best argument for freedom of speech; not that it is a good in itself, but that to stop it, you have to escalate violence. Speech can do harm, but the harm is generally less than the physical violence — such as restraining someone, or arresting them — you need to engage in to stop people from talking.

Speech can absolutely do good things, or lead to good. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t bother writing. Speech didn’t get rid of slavery, but it did help set the ground for people to believe that getting rid of slavery was a worthwhile goal. It also, though, led to people being willing to defend slavery in the 1860s, and racism in the 1860s and on up to today. The goodness or value of speech can’t be separated from the content of speech. This is why the much brooted dictum “I disagree with what you say, but defend to your death the right to say it!” is largely incoherent. If content doesn’t matter, if you’re not even listening to what is said before you defend it, in what sense can you be said to actually disagree?

You could certainly argue that the state shouldn’t police speech, because using state power against people is cruel, violence is bad, and the people most likely to be stomped by the state are those with the least institutional power. You can argue that the government should not be able to censor speech, because that opens the door inevitably to government censoring criticism of itself, which vitiates the transparency necessary for a democracy to function. Those are reasonable arguments. But they’re not really an argument for free speech as a moral good in itself.

In fact, in practice, the call of “free speech” seems like it’s often a way, not to take a moral stance, but to avoid taking one. If you support free speech as a moral ideal in itself, you don’t have to think about the content of speech at all. The nature of the speech — what it’s saying — is beside the point. Oddly, the call of “free speech” tends to end discussion. Once you’ve praised the speech for being free, what’s left to say? It doesn’t matter what you mean, it only matters that you mean something. Whether it’s Hitler or Ghandhi talking, it’s speech. Defend it!

But if free speech isn’t a moral good in itself, it becomes, not an ideal, but a tool, which, like any tool, can be used for good or ill. That doesn’t mean that we should lock in prison people who say things we don’t like, not least because locking people in prison is an evil as well, and often a worse one than the wrongs it purports to punish. But it does mean that if you defend vile shit, you’re just defending vile shit — though what is and isn’t vile shit can, of course, be up for vigorous debate. That debate seems like it should be on the merits of the speech itself, though, and not on the grounds that everyone should be able to say whatever they want in every venue. Still less should it be on the grounds that vile speech is especially valuable because of its very vileness. You don’t become a better person by championing revenge porn.

Again, morality isn’t legality, and for many of the reasons I’ve discussed here I think making speech illegal is in most circumstances a bad idea. But expression in itself isn’t a good, or a guarantor of virtue. Morality inheres in what you say, not in having said it.

104 thoughts on “The Morality of Free Speech, Or Lack Thereof

  1. It’s a really worthwhile exercise to distinguish between forma and content, in the realm of ethics especially. All of our “freedom” (as you suggest) hasn’t stopped us in the US from, say, having 25% of all the incarcerated people on earth.

  2. Right… And you do sometimes get the feeling that people care more about free speech than about actually locking people up. Which seems like it’s morally confused, to me.

  3. Of course it means moral leverage, because the people who got locked up didn’t “appreciate” their freedom- they “abused” it. Which is why nobody who is locked up can vote, and many ex-incarcerated people can’t vote either.

  4. Very well said! Have you read Stanley Fish’s “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech (and It’s a Good Thing Too)”? That book completely changed my thinking in law school.

    It’s no surprise that in a sexist society, we would value the right to force speech on others more highly than the right to say “no” to that interaction. Same for the way we’ve enshrined this moral distinction between speech and violence, as if verbal abuse and sexual harassment did not feel like violence nor lay the groundwork for violence. As you say, the law has to draw that line for practical reasons, but to make it the basis of our ethics is a cop-out.

  5. Very interesting; he argues that the U.S. understanding of free speech is built on the legal fiction that words and actions are absolutely separable; the courts can regulate speech that crosses over into action. But of course, if speech is incapable of producing action, it’s inconsequential. So the two choices are, speech that can be regulated or speech that doesn’t matter. Which is why in the U.S. you get strong free speech advocates as the people who most strongly insist that speech has no effect on anyone, and proponents of art loudly declaring that art is irrelevant.

    Also perhaps why free speech ends up being its own virtue; the greatest art is art that has no content other than its meta-enthusiasm for its own act of speech. Crumb is the greatest artist of all time because the only thing he has to say is, “Hey! I should say whatever I want!”

  6. Yeah absolutely. Thus the distinction between form and content. People who want action dismiss discourse, and people who want to tell obnoxious hateful jokes tell you “it’s just a joke.”

  7. Pingback: Censure vs. Censor: A Blog Carnival

  8. I think this discussion of Censure vs. Censorship is really awesome – would it be violated blog etiquette to ask that HU repost the full roundtable list here and perhaps extend the roundtable within HU? It seems like a rich discussion.

  9. Not at all! I’ll probably put all the links in a post tomorrow. I don’t know that we’ll do a formal roundtable thingee, but if someone wants to write more about it, I’d be happy to run more.

  10. I really don’t understand your argument, Noah. You seem to agree that it’s bad for the state to limit speech (maybe with some exceptions). Doesn’t it logically follow that it is good for the state to be prevented from limiting speech–ie, for speech to be free? Maybe I need to read your article a few more times, but it seems like you’re just being contrarian.

  11. Read the Stanley Fish piece? He’s basically saying the same thing.

    I think it’s bad for the state to limit speech in most cases because I’m against state violence, *not* because I think speech is sacred. That’s an important distinction.

    If speech is sacred, regardless of content, you start to get people claiming that they’re being censored if they don’t get access to a particular platform. You get people claiming that speech should never be limited, no matter how much harm it causes.

    When universities prevent transphobes from speaking; I’m cool with that, because transphobia is bad, and the harm of cosigning that crap is, IMO, worse than the benefits of letting them speak. You have to balance good and bad outcomes. Free speech is a claim to not having to balance; it suggests that you can escape political considerations of the content of speech in favor of a transcendent moral principle of “free speech.” It’s my conention (and Fish’s) that that transcendent principle doesn’t exist.

  12. I feel like I need to bring up the Stephen Salaita affair- the highly repainted Palestinian professor who was de-hired from my school, the University of Illinois, for tweeting angrily when Israel was killing hundreds of civilians in Gaza last year. The virtue is not that he was speaking, and the evil was not in silencing- the evil was in punishing a speaker in a completely unreasonable fashion for doing what he is known for doing- caring about violence perpetrated against his people.

  13. Right…I was just thinking about that. The issue there is framed as free speech vs. civility; the political content is totally put to one side. But of course, the political content is central. Is Israel beyond criticism because we think Israel is so awesome? Or is condemning the mass killing of civilians (even angrily) a reasonable thing to do?

    I think that’s actually a way better argument for the liberal position. The University is wrong not because of failure of free speech, but because they’re condoning violence and racism in the name of donor cash.

  14. I think the point missing from your and Fish’s arguments is that the principle enshrined in the First Amendment is not “Freedom of Speech” but rather the prohibition on laws restricting citizens’ claims of Free Speech.

    “Free Speech” is especially not a privilege that citizens or institutions are bound to respect with each other, and Fish is absolutely correct that citizen and institutional regulation of speech is properly political.

    The plain purpose of the First Amendment was always in the recognition that the outcome of political contests is control of the government and the making of laws, and that politics does not end with that control. Therefore all governments will get a political benefit from silencing their political rivals using the power of the state. The first amendment makes this more difficult to accomplish.

    Once again, it is a specific prohibition on using the powers of the state to silence political opposition.

    The trouble with Fish’s argument is that it’s largely a straw man which creates a notion of “Freedom of Speech” between citizens and institutions which is not implied by the first amendment and then demolishes it. The only freedom of speech that exists is a CLAIM of such by a citizen which the state is then restricted from regulating.

    Fish rightly points out that even with this definition laws regulating speech are passed, particularly where the speech is used as a tool to effect violence or coercion. It is reasonable that jurisprudence will always attempt to balance these interests. But keep in mind that the principle of the first amendment is always to test whether the state in balancing these questions is seeking to censor political expression.

    Ultimately, we define here the character of American politics, whereby political expression and organization is largely unrestricted by the state, but violent political action is tightly proscribed.

    So when the state restricts hate speech (such as placing racist slogans in the community or even targeting businesses or individuals), it does so because it has been demonstrated as a de facto incitement to violence against a protected group. When it declines to restrict “academic” articles on holocaust denial, it is because by using the public forums for the debate the harm is judged to remain within those forums.

    Ultimately, non-governmental speech forums should be (and largely are) free to set their own rules for permissible speech, and it is reasonable for there to exist wide variation in these forums.

    As to the morality of free speech claims, I agree that free speech claims are not inherently moral, but once again the only substantive free speech claims are against government legislation restricting it. All other claims are just as you say.

  15. I guess I basically do believe that speech is sacred. It’s the main thing that sets us apart from other species, isn’t it? Without the language-based ability to form abstract concepts, we wouldn’t be able to arrive at the conviction that Israel bombing Gaza is unjust. No, I haven’t read Stanley Fish yet.

  16. ” Ultimately, we define here the character of American politics, whereby political expression and organization is largely unrestricted by the state, but violent political action is tightly proscribed.”

    Right; Fish is arguing that this distinction is incoherent and ultimately arbitrary (or rather, political.) Speech and action aren’t easily separable; you separate them by saying, well this speech is dangerous to the average person — but that means privileging the average person, and saying they matter more than the marginalized (in practice.)

    Free speech is used rhetorically well beyond government regulation by just about everybody, fwiw.

  17. @Noah:

    Agreed. But then we must ask: what is the goal beyond the status quo? How can we better protect marginalized voices, and who determines which voices are protected, and who is responsible for doing so?

    If all speech is political, then all speech advocating its restriction to prevent harm is likewise political, and no more or less so than that of those who defend speech perceived harmful using free speech principles.

    Arguing that “free speech” does not exist does not end the politics. Possibly it ends an easy crutch for the preservation of the interests of conventional opinion, but it cuts both ways because blanket free speech principles (however inchoate) have just as frequently been used to protect subversive or minority speech.

  18. Oh sure; I’m not claiming I’m above politics.

    I think you can argue back and forth about how free speech arguments have or haven’t been used in the past. I think at the moment they are very often used to silence or target minority voices, while they seem largely ineffectual in protecting the speech of marginalized groups (like Salaita.) That’s more or less my point here (and I think Fish’s) — the left’s acquiescence to free speech as an ideal has not served them well recently.

  19. I think that the left is very reticent to give up free speech as a principle because of its success in protecting leftist values in slightly more distant past. For instance, the free speech concept was instrumental in protecting individuals in the Civil Rights movement from reprisals, and protected anti-war protesters in the Vietnam era. It also protected artists and authors from censorship on obscenity grounds.

    Speaking from the political left, I have to ask what the left (broadly speaking) is gaining politically by giving up the free speech principle. The restriction of hate speech? I think that’s on pretty firm ground to start with under the principle that the most harmful hate speech incites violence or constituted harassment.

    Most of the other stuff seems to be about skirmishes between private citizens on the internet or about the policies of private institutions. I agree that speech on the internet is harmful to individuals–to the extent that it constitutes harassment.

    The remedy for marginalized voices is organization, publicity, and political agitation against discrimination (in both the public and private spheres). I don’t think there is anything to be gained by liberals proclaiming that free speech does not exist (even if it’s true). Is that going to magically make the Westboro Baptist Church go away? Is that going to protect trans persons from harassment?

    In a larger sense, the recognition of the political nature of free speech claims does not prevent the continued assertion of free speech by actors in bad faith, which I take to be the real issue here. According to Fish, we disapprove of free speech claims because they are made for ideas we find politically abhorrent, and that since they were not “free” to begin with we will always advocate to silence them.

    OK, but now what? The reason that minority voices are silenced is not because the majority cloaks itself in free speech claims, but because majorities win political victories and institutions protect those victories.

    I just find it odd that the principle of free speech, which has famously protected minority rights throughout our history, is now the enemy. Fish himself throws up his hands and says that there is no safe place to judge and regulate speech, but I find it hard to agree that throwing out free speech principles makes it safer.

  20. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights — like the Magna Carta before it, and the Roman and Greek Republics which influenced both — was one of the final major death knell for slavery — which once existed on every continent and was practiced by every race on the planet. It did not matter that slavery was still being practiced when the Constitution and Bill of Rights was drafted. The wiser folks knew that once “All men are created equal” was codified into the law of the land, it was only a matter of time before slavery would become a vestige of the past.

  21. Russ, your counter-factual history is such complete poppycock it’s not even worth refuting. Please read Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told,” then come back to me.

    amanasleep, people in the Civil Rights movement were hardly insulated from reprisals? People got shot and killed with some frequency, as I recall, from major movement leaders to civilians. Same with Vietnam War protestors; those people were hardly immune to police harassment or violence.

    Free speech really *has not* protected minority rights throughout our history. As I say in the piece, free speech didn’t prevent the U.S. from being a vast prison camp during slavery; it doesn’t prevent the vast prison camp we’ve got now.

    I would say that pointing out that free speech is rhetoric is important precisely because the claim to “free speech” is used to do exactly what you’re doing — to pretend that victories have been won which haven’t, and to suggest that generalized agreement on first principles has protected minorities, when it’s done nothing of the kind. It makes it seem more important to protect harassers than the harassed (see Fish’s discussion of the student newspaper printing that op-ed.) It tends to make people diminish the kinds of violence you find online (which I think you’re doing here to some extent.)

    Like, you have major voices on the left, like Jonathan Chait, taking up tons of space and time crapping on folks in the name of free speech. I think that’s worth contesting.

  22. Or maybe shorter; the main way racism works at the moment is anti-anti-racism; the idea that the people who point out racism are the real villains. A lot of the rhetorical or ideological power there comes from the idea that people are being victimized by having their free speech rights infringed; “why can’t I say the n-word without being called a racist?! You’re oppressing me!” I think free speech rhetoric has become pretty central to anti-anti-racism and anti-anti-sexism, and to the meme that white guys are the real oppressed. So, talking about the limits of free speech ideology seems an important thing for the left to do.

  23. @Noah:

    You cannot credibly argue that the first amendment did not protect Civil Rights activists. Here’s a rundown:

    http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/civil-rights-first-amendment

    It’s one thing to say that civil rights activists were subject to reprisals. Of course they were. But the successes of that movement in the courts were massively supported by free speech principles and first amendment arguments. And this was done despite a majority massively more hostile to their cause than we see today.

  24. I’m a little skeptical of some of the claims at that link…but in any case, I’m not saying that the first amendment should be repealed or anything. I’m just arguing for a recognition that free speech is not a good in itself, and that when it’s used to attack leftist goals, you don’t have to acquiesce in that in the name of a higher morality.

  25. The fact that modern racists are reduced to claiming reverse racism must be seen for what it is: a massive political victory for the left and civil rights activists, who in 50 years have taken an apartheid state to where the only accepted racism is in policing (and incarceration) and internet forums. I view the former as the premiere issue for the left today. The latter is also important, but IMO addressed by political organization.

    You are not going to silence Chait’s asshattery merely by recognizing that he serves an entrenched political majority or by unilaterally giving up claims to free speech. For that you need a political victory, one that I fully endorse.

  26. “to where the only accepted racism”

    That’s not true, unfortunately. There’s lots of accepted racism. The justice system is the biggest example. The Republican party is largely constructed around white identity politics; racism remains a massive force in the U.S.

    I’d agree that making overt racism verboten is a good thing, and progress — but the reification of anti-anti-racism still matters. And, you know, things can get always get worse. They have before.

  27. Who’s acquiescing? When right wingers claim reverse racism and smugly claim that they are exercising free speech, they get shouted down and retreat to their own forums.

    I fail to see the huge success of free speech arguments assailing leftist goals. I also fail to see the benefit to leftists in assailing free speech. Who is it exactly who’s getting a pass for their terrible opinions by smugly crying “free speech”?

    The reductio ad absurdum of the “free speech isn’t free” argument is that it’s all politics and you can use that recognition as an argument against your political adversaries. I don’t see it. The right doesn’t believe in free speech anyway, so they will welcome the left giving up the principle. In fact, I would say that current right-wing trolling on the issue is precisely because they hate the whole concept so much. And they don’t hate free speech because it’s an illusion. They hate it because it has been used so successfully by the left to roll back right wing suppression of minority speech.

    If free speech is “just” a political tool, I cannot agree that it has benefited the right more than the left, or the majority more than the minority. I think the left dispenses with it at our peril.

  28. There have been some writers, like Jodi Malamed and Nikhil Singh, who point out that the relative tolerance of Federal officials for civil rights activism served an international agenda during the Cold War. I admit that that’s cynical, but, on the other hand, how do you make sense of LBJ’s domestic policies vis-a-vis the unprovoked attack on Vietnam?

    As regards the Salaita affair, I would point out that the University of Illinois is not a private institution per se, although it seems to be, in this case (and many others), making decisions based on the wishes of large-money donors. Chances are, the “free speech” of the donors is what will eventually win out, because the massacre of civilians as a legitimate cause for (thoroughly nonviolent) outrage is able to be marginalized under the kind of “free speech” protection that got hundreds of activists killed and locked up under the auspices of COINTELPRO in the past.

  29. “When right wingers claim reverse racism and smugly claim that they are exercising free speech, they get shouted down and retreat to their own forums.”

    So…Islamofascism is not a meme? Rhetorical framing of the war on terror as a fight for free speech — this doesn’t exist?

  30. Leaving aside the NSA, here’s a story about how anti-lynching laws are being used to persecute peaceful protestors in California. Who knows if that law ever stopped even one lynching?

    Admittedly the ACLU might decide to ameliorate that situation, but that doesn’t address the fact that laws are made and sustained on violence.

  31. “As I say in the piece, free speech didn’t prevent the U.S. from being a vast prison camp during slavery”

    Noah, this argument is probably very confused . According to American Constitutional Law professor David Kairys “No right of free speech as we know it existed, either in law or practice, until a basic transformation of the law governing speech in the period from about 1919 to 1940. Before then time one spoke only at the discretion of local, and sometimes federal, authorizes…”

    You can read his article on the topic here:

    http://homepages.gac.edu/~arosenth/395/Kairys_Freedom_of_Speech.pdf

    (I have no idea if there’s any counter argument or rebuttal to his article by any other historian, it’s just an article I happen to read.)

  32. In the early parts of american history the first amendment would have only applied to federal, not state governments. The incorporation doctrine applies it to the states.

  33. “So…Islamofascism is not a meme? Rhetorical framing of the war on terror as a fight for free speech — this doesn’t exist?”

    Who claimed they didn’t exist? Right wingers use free speech claims to defend their political views, just as you claim.

    I dispute that the best way to combat this is for the left to relinquish rhetorical claims to free speech protections. For one thing, so long as the 1st amendment continues to exist the right will continue to use that framing regardless of what the left says. The retreat of the left from ownership of that rhetorical stance will simply embolden them to claim it completely for themselves.

    Not for nothing, free speech arguments continue to be some of the strongest arguments against the security state from the left. Without free speech rhetoric, it would have been extremely difficult for the left to support Manning and Snowden as forcefully as they have done. Likewise, the Occupy movement made use of traditional free speech and protest protections established by the Civil Rights movement.

    The reason why the right won after 9/11 was because they convinced the majority that they would protect them from an arguably real terrorist threat (one that much of the left acquiesced to at the time). The problem is the War on Terror is wrong and doesn’t achieve it’s own goals, full stop. It’s not the rhetorical framing.

    The left needs political victories, not better rhetoric. Political victories will by their nature constrict the scope of acceptable speech and force retrograde views to the margin.

  34. Hah…it’s another proponent of free speech claiming rhetoric doesn’t matter.

    Political victories occur in part through persuasion — of other people, of courts, of politicians, etc.

    Free speech rhetoric can be useful. It isn’t always though. The left support for the War on Terror was partly obtained through an appeal to free speech rhetoric. That’s part of where Christopher Hitchens signed on board, for example. I do in fact think that kind of use of free speech as political cover for imperialism and anti-anti-racism is effective, and worth arguing against (inasmuch as, since I don’t believe in free speech, I can acknowledge that words matter.)

  35. Democracy and the right to a defense attorney also lead to “vile shit” in many cases, like the election of George W. Bush and the acquital of murderers. Would you deny that those principles are moral goods?

  36. I think they’re procedural instruments; they’re means, not ends. Democracy is a pretty terrible form of government; it seems to be the best one we’ve discovered though for protecting freedom and ensuring fairness before the state. So no, it’s not a moral good in itself; it’s only good insofar as it leads to moral outcomes. There’s a decent case to be made that some small scale societies which function by consensus rather than by democracy do a better job with providing moral goods to their people, for example (though it’s not clear those are scalable.)

    If the right to a defense attorney is an absolute good, that sort of presumes that our adversarial justice system is some sort of absolute moral good, which I don’t think is the case. The public defender system is a mess; you could argue it just needs to be improved, but you could also argue that the fact that the rich get more justice is intentional, and the purpose of the system as a whole.

  37. I’m not claiming that rhetoric doesn’t matter. I’m claiming that the rhetoric of the left will not be improved by abandoning free speech to the right.

    Hitchens (and others) signed on to the Iraq war because they wanted war for their own reasons. The rhetoric surrounding the build up to war was overwhelmingly oppressive to “free speech” anyway, with anti-war voices effectively silenced by appeals to national security and patriotism as checkmating claims to free speech.

    It’s pretty difficult to claim that free speech rhetoric had any part in supporting the political move towards war, unless you conflate appeals to “freedom” with those of “free speech”.

  38. Hitchens’ whole hatred of Islamofascism is tied to his love of Orwell, which is about free speech (not solely, but centrally.)

    Orwell as a club with which to beat the left is a pretty popular meme in general.

  39. Okay, at least you’re consistent. I think democracy is an end in itself in that it ideally allows everyone to have some say in how their society is run. That’s why it was important for blacks and women to get the vote; not because it would lead to better government.

    Speaking of Hitchens, I once heard him say that in any classroom, the most valuable student is the one who denies evolution and/or the Holocaust. He added that the other students are all contemptible sheep unless they can refute those views via one-on-one forensic debate. That’s probably the most extreme defense of free speech I’ve ever heard; it actually seems kind of nutty.

  40. Yep; that’s free speech absolutism for you. Funny how that praise of thoroughgoing skepticism somehow didn’t allow him to see through the Bush administrations transparent lies.

  41. And the left combats this view by saying that Islamofascists don’t actually present a danger to free speech because it’s all an illusion anyway? How was that argument going to keep us out of war?

    The correct response is that Islamic terrorists do not present the same threat that Orwell talked about because they lack the power, and that War with Saddam was not going to combat them effectively anyways.

    Which is the argument that the anti-war left made at the time.

    But for some reason, the media in 2003 did not represent anti-war opinions as valid. Maybe we could have used some “free speech” types to get those opinions heard, but what I heard was that the free speech rights of the minority anti-war crowd had to be ignored because national security.

  42. See, free speech never helps get those opinions heard. In this case it actually repressed them (folks criticizing the war were against freedom, which definitely included free speech.)

    It’s hard to know what could have prevented the rush to war after 9/11. In general, though, I would like a left able to talk more about harm reduction and less about the need to bomb the shit out of people for failing to provide their people with free speech, democracy, or what have you.

  43. On this we agree. The correct argument against war is that it causes more harm than good, and doesn’t achieve even it’s most cynical goals (fighting them there instead of here).

    But the idea that because right wingers used “freedom” arguments to suppress anti-war speech that the left must abandon them is hard to swallow. It just teaches us that the Left should be able to throw patriotism right back at them and say that a TRUE PATRIOT would not send his fellow citizens to war for no good reason. That the TRUE THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY is enacting a huge police state and endless wars in response to the actions of a few criminals. That GREAT AMERICAN response to the threat of terrorism is to prosecute terrorists like the common criminals they are, and to strengthen our ties with governments and people around the world to embolden those who would be our allies.

    The reality is that 9/11 happened after the left already lost a political contest. Once again you are right that it’s all politics.

  44. There’s a meme out there about how Jupiter’s Titan moon has a ton of oil- and an image of a flag and an eagle, with the declaration, “Looks Like Titan Needs Some Freedom.” Of course silencing dissent is undemocratic, and therefore problematic. It is generally violent as well, and bad for that reason. But I don’t worry about the NSA because of my speech not being free, I worry about it because it means that power is being given to a fascist apparatus.

  45. Yeah, I don’t think free speech or the lack of it had much to do with the rush to war.
    Whatever happened in the US, there was massive opposition to the war in the UK – to the extent I think its fair to say the majority of the population were against it.
    Certainly anti-war opinion and scepticism to notions of “regime change” were widely expressed. And yet…
    Hard to say what would have stopped the war when the government were determined to go ahead, but I think it would have required more active opposition on top of talking about it.

  46. This is a little off-topic, but does anyone else see leftist opposition to offensive speech as divorced from real-life problems? I was thinking about how opposition to rape jokes began during the Bush Administration, when the government was using “rectal rehydration” and other forms of sexual assault against terrorism suspects. Did the writers for “Jezebel” ever complain about the latter? Their tax dollars were helping to pay for it. Closer to home, do you think many oppressed people would give a shit about “Fukitor”? I’ll admit that I’m as sheltered and apathetic as they come and have never lifted a finger to fight real injustice.

  47. I don’t know, maybe my last comment was stupid. I’m aware that rape is a real-life problem here and not just in CIA black sites. I’ll shut up now.

  48. Noah wrote: “Russ, your counter-factual history is such complete poppycock it’s not even worth refuting. Please read Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told,” then come back to me.”

    Clearly you don’t believe in social evolution then, because everything I know about history clearly points to the fact that slavery was on the way out worldwide in the 1700s — its rise in the southern part of the US during that period notwithstanding. The North phased out slavery in the latter part of the 1700s as more and more people jumped on the “Let’s break away from England” bandwagon and especially after the Revolutionary War — a clear indication that the idea of individual freedom and rights was also influencing people’s view about the obvious and disturbing dichotomy of espousing such things while, at the same time, tolerating the ownership of another human being.

    I never said there was no economic incentive for the South to latch onto slavery as long as it did. But the fact is, it WAS slavery’s last gasp – and forward thinking individuals knew it. It was slavery’s version of Hitler’s “Battle of the Bulge,” or a dying star going supernova.

    As for Baptist’s book, after reading the reviews, I don’t see anything particularly ground-breaking in it regarding what I already knew about the South’s 19th Century slavery economics – probably because what I knew about slavery did not come primarily from Hollywood, I guess. It appears to elaborate on the economic relationships between banks and business during the expansion of slavery in the early-to-mid-1800s as US expansionism pushed west – but such “revelations” are hardly a big surprise.

    The LA Times – hardly a bastion of conservative thought – called it “a fresh if flawed take on a history we thought we knew too well.” Even “The New York Times,” while applauding his scholarly financial insights, takes him to task for needlessly sprinkling into his work soap-operatic embellishments.

    To which I say, no thanks. I just want the facts.

  49. The Greeks and the Romans, whom you apparently adore, were enormously dependent on slavery. Painting slavery as some kind of medieval holdover gets America off the hook for a system of race- based bondage and manifest destiny expansionism that still exists. The largest source of economic capital on the U.S. In the 19th century was not factories, not land, but SLAVES. There’s a fact.

  50. I mean…Russ’ faith in rational progress is (amusingly) not susceptible to rational discussion. But, again, Edward Baptist makes a really strong case that slavery was not backwards looking, but an extremely innovative an constantly expanding source of wealth, which became the basis (through wealth production, through the creation of financial instruments, through rationalized techniques of labor coercion) for worldwide capitalism and U.S. preeminence in it.

    Seeing progress as somehow existing separate from political or moral actors is actually I think part and parcel of the way that free speech creates a political stance outside politics. There’s a hollowing out of the content of moral and political choices in favor of formal teleologies and structures which manage to be moral without any moral actors. I guess that’s my ultimate answer to why free speech as a value is not helpful to the left. It may have some pragmatic usefulness…but the overarching ideology of our time is not actually conservatism, but pragmatism. The emptying of ideology, the dream of a polity that doesn’t dream, is how capitalism hopes to turn us all into laboring nodes whose only moral and ideological commitment is to labor itself. Free speech — the belief that the mere existence of thought is more important than the content — is in that sense the ultimate expression of capitalist modernity. You can maybe win some small victories against the machine using the machine’s tools, but if you want to stop being a cog, you need to try a different approach.

  51. And again, Russ’ notion that slavery can be reduced to “just the facts,” and that a discussion of the pain, trauma and cruelty and hearbreak — all that soap opera— of slavery is somehow less important than lists of figures and abstract progress — that’s the logic of slavery itself, right? Still with us and going strong. It probably made the shirt you’re wearing, progress be damned.

  52. Jack, I think this is the answer to the point about speech being sacred. I think speech is what makes humans human, if anything does. I think the ideology of free speech doesn’t honor that as sacred so much as it tries to bracket it. What you say doesn’t actually matter; it’s only your ability to say it that counts. Speech becomes a formal exercise, rather than an expression of social and political and aesthetic meaning. You could say, “I disagree with what you say, but I defend your right to say it,” could really be applied as well to a cat as to a human. Or to put it another way, if speech is sacred, what’s sacred about it is the ability to convey meaning, not the fact that sounds come out.

  53. Like everyone else on the internet who has ever promised to shut up, I’ll go ahead and break that promise.

    I think there’s some distance between the content and worth of speech because speech with bad content can have good consequences. You think Russ’s comments here are nonsense, but they’re prompting you to say things that you presumably view as worthwhile. You don’t like Robert Crumb’s work, but it was an influence on Johnny Ryan’s work, which you do like, as well as on Alison Bechdel’s work, which I believe Kim O’Connor likes. Hitchens may have over-valued Holocaust deniers, but Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg has said that they’ve unwittingly made some valuable contributions to Holocaust studies. A lot of apparently worthless speech is potentially valuable.

    I think there’s some evidence that free speech is conducive to a better understanding of the world and to kinder societies. Since the Enlightenment, the West seems to have become freer and more egalitarian, at least internally, as well as more scientifically advanced. At least some of that is probably due to the liberal/free-speech principle that authority and received wisdom are open to question.

  54. Freedom of speech arguments suffer from the fact that the word “freedom” has become a God-term in US liberal-democratic discourse. In fact, what a lot of commenters are calling a value of the left is actually a value of classical liberalism, where “freedom-to” trumps “freedom-from.” This isn’t an accident, as liberalism views that the individual is the fundamental unit of society, and thus views anything that restricts those freedoms as a threat to the social order. Compare this to a society that defines freedom as “freedom-from,” as in freedom from want, or freedom from threat. In those societies, a person’s freedom-to is more readily limited to assure freedom from (that’s where we get truly progressive taxation). Importantly, both definitions of freedom allow for democracy, though freedom-to is more encouraging of laissez faire capitalism.

    So what does this have to do with speech? The smart-ass answer is that in a country where money=speech, the emphasis on freedom-to provides an argument for unlimited campaign donations. But that’s not what we’re discussing here, is it?

    When we talk about freedom of speech we default to the “freedom to speak.” We forget that when we protect the freedom to speak we risk impinging not only on freedom-from speech, which is to say freedom from speech that makes the world a difficult place in which to live, and for certain people, to speak. Paradoxically, the unreflective privileging of the freedom to speak actually creates an obstacle to freedom of speech. And this gets me to the question of moral goods.

    As a society, the US has a long history of divorcing politics from questions of moral good. There’s a reason for this, which is that the pragmatism of Rawls (and to a lesser extent Dewey) greases the wheels of discourse by bracketing questions about what is “true” or “good” and focussing instead on questions about what is legitimate and procedures for securing a consensus. As a result, assumptions about moral goods sneak in through the backdoor and elude sustained examination. Everyone just agrees that freedom is good without actually examining what freedom means, not only to them, but to others. Freedom-to is conflated with freedom-from, and we all truck along under a false consensus about what freedom of speech means.

    However, if we unpack the notion of freedom even a little, we see the dynamic between freedom-to-speak and freedom-from-speech. This creates dissensus, which makes it anathema to pragmatism, but it also allows us to recuperate freedom of speech as a moral good, something to nurture and protect. This would allow us to discuss it as more than means to an end, a means that might or might not outlive its usefulness.

  55. Jack, I certainly think there’s worth to engaging with folks you disagree with…to a point. I moderate the comments threads pretty closely, because I think they’d rapidly become useless if I didn’t (see basically any mainstream site.)

    Nate — thank! Was waiting for you to weigh in.

  56. I’m conflicted on the whole issue of hate speech and to what extent it needs to be protected.

    My feeling is banning hate speech gives one a distorted view of reality, and I don’t WANT a distorted view of reality. I don’t like either homophobia or racism, but if they’re still out there, I want to know about it. I don’t want to be surprised by it, as I think people end up being when the mainstream media becomes so cleansed of prejudice. “What, cops are shooting black kids? Toughs are roughing up drag queens? But this is 21st century, and that’s SOOO 1950s!”

    None of this means I want racists and homophobes getting equal time on TV. Like I said, I’m conflicted.

  57. If racists target someone for harassment, I want you to be able to (for example) shut down the site — or at least have some recourse. You don’t at the moment, unfortunately.

  58. Is the whole “freedom from” idea something that existed outside of the New Deal? I feel like that’s something that the left could bring back, but it’s not what Americans really ever mean by “freedom.” Or maybe anyone else.

  59. A lot of “freedom from” rhetoric has been developed I believe by left and communist regimes as a response to “freedom to” rhetoric in the west.

    It may precede that, but places like China certainly use it when talking about the limits they put on free speech, etc. (Though how exactly it contributes to freedom from want to mercilessly persecute groups like the Falun Gong is pretty unclear.)

  60. Bert: The concepts of negative and positive liberty go back to Kant, and its a recurring theme in political philosophy. I don’t know that it’s ever taken hold as a concept in American political discourse, in part because of its debt to enlightenment conception of liberalism. Maybe back when we still called ourselves a republic?

    That having been said, freedom from rhetoric is common to libertarians (I think Ayn Rand made the case for it). After all, it’s easy to read “freedom from” as freedom from government constraints. I’m out of my depth here, but as I understand it positive and negative freedom are really two sides of the same coin. That is, the autonomy or agency necessary to having the freedom to do something presupposes a certain freedom from constraints. The problem, as I sort of alluded to above, is that when used loosely the word freedom can mean either, neither or both, and this makes it hard to have a rigorous conversation about freedom of speech.

    As for whether the left could operationalize freedom from rhetoric, I think it would be tricky. Basically, it would require people to accept that we’re not all, already free, which would be difficult given the ideology that drives late democratic capitalism.

  61. I get the concept- I just wonder if (outside of FDR and Kant and Mao) “freedom” has ever widely functioned as a synonym for “security.”

  62. By which I mean- freedom in the West is opposed to slavery. Slaves live in highly compromised circumstances, but they tend to have their basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, and protection met by their master.

  63. “they tend to have their basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, and protection met by their master.”

    That’s not really accurate; slaves were often all but starved; many had little in the way of clothing provided, and it’s hard to say what protection means when you can be beaten and have your kids stolen from you.

    I think it’s true that this is how slavery is often *conceived*. That is, the worst thing about slavery is the restriction on freedom. The systematic exploitation and cruelty is often bracketed in a way that I think props up the freedom to/freedom from binary.

  64. I certainly take your point about slavery being usually a fate worse than death, in many respects. Frequently there was an incentive for masters to not completely let their property die. It’s quite interesting how this discussion (not accidentally) ends up being about slavery.

  65. “Nate A.: “As a society, the US has a long history of divorcing politics from questions of moral good. There’s a reason for this, which is that the pragmatism of Rawls…greases the wheels of discourse by bracketing questions about what is “true” or “good””

    Would you be able to tell me how many truly “pragmatic” societies have actually instituted anything like Rawls’ A Theory of Justice? Because I simply don’t see it; it seems far too “moral” and if there’s been any effort to do so in the past, it’s mostly been lip service and flailing of hands. If only “pragmatism” was so wonderful. If you want to see “pragmatism” honed to a national creed, you should stay a while in Singapore.

  66. Noah -(Though how exactly it contributes to freedom from want to mercilessly persecute groups like the Falun Gong is pretty unclear.)

    Well that’s pretty easy to explain using their “logic.” Falun Gong members are subversives who aim to disrupt the harmony of society and hence effective governance and prosperity in general. Anything harming the legitimacy of the CPC and its steady hand on the tiller needs to be quashed in this narrative. We had a mini-version of this involving “Marxists” (mainly Catholics involved in liberation theology) where I live in the late 80s.

  67. Ng: I didn’t mean to imply that the US is (or was) truly pragmatic as a society, though I can certainly see why you inferred as much from my comment. Rather, I meant to argue that pragmatism a la Rawls is often invoked to present unexamined moral “goods” like freedom as untethered to a specific philosophical or religious tradition, but as a means to the end of justice (toward which we are told the arc of history swings).

  68. I should add that I think there is another kind of pragmatism at work in US, and at this point global politics, which is a market pragmatism, where what’s good for finance is good for justice. What we end up with is a sort of unholy marriage of Rawls and Hayek. Michael J. Sandel makes this point across a couple of books, and while I’m not as pessimistic as he is about Rawls, nor am I as optimistic about a ethically oriented political practice, I think his diagnosis of the problem is sound.

  69. Noah — Baptist interspersed made-up soap operatic stuff — for emotional effect — into what was supposed to be a fact-based scholarly book about slavery. This undermines his credibility.

    To tap feelings and emotions of slaves in a scholarly fashion, he should have used direct quotes from period recollections or publications — rather than academically lazy fictitious accounts.

    If Baptist felt compelled to freely mix facts with fiction, he should have written a novel.

  70. You’re making up things Baptist wrote in order to accuse him of wrongly making up stuff.

    Having just read Bayard’s “How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read,” I appreciate your creative audacity. You are wrong, but you are wrong with self-parodic flair.

  71. Noah — I’m going by the reviewer’s critiques, which were actually sympathetic to the author and the subject matter. Scholarly books shouldn’t interject fiction for emotional effect, and if Baptist did that, as the reviews indicate, then shame on him.

    That’s one of my pet peeves: Scholars and scientists preying on the emotions of their audiences. Stick with the facts, or write a novel. Don’t intermix the two.

  72. “Stick with the facts” “I haven’t read this book” — do you see why this juxtaposition is amusing?

    It’s not “Preying on the emotions” to treat slavery as an emotional issue, man. History is not a series of equations. Treating it as such is a very ideological choice.

    Anyway, if graphs are what you want, Baptist has lots of graphs. Rejecting the entire argument because of a “pet peeve”; again, that’s pretty funny.

  73. If slaves were the main engine of American economic growth in the 19th century, how is it that at the time of the Civil War the non-slaveholding North was immensely richer and more populous than the South?

  74. Again, I’d suggest Ed Baptist’s book. Cotton was the basis of U.S. economic growth; Northerners got rich off it as well.

    It’s like asking, if workers are the main engine of American economic growth in America, why are CEO’s immensely richer than laborers? Capitalism moves money around.

  75. Sure, New England textile mills and so on. But the disparity in wealth is still too huge, and it came about after Northern states abolished slavery. Before, it was the Southern states that were richer.

    Fact is that slavery allowed the South to slack on industrialisation. This continued on well into the 20th century –the South didn’t start to industrialise until the 1950s. It remained something of a third-world nation inside America, one I well remember from travelling there in the ’60s.

  76. Nope. None of that is true, just about. Yes, the North abolished slavery, but the wealth they amassed was based in the massive increases in production in the south resulting from the perfection of torture techniques, basically. Baptist has eye-opening tables showing increases in cotton production. It’s unreal.

    Slaves also became collateral for new financial instruments, which created a bubble, fueling expansion. Investors in the north and overseas created huge fortunes through speculating in slaves (who were traded again and again as a result, separated from families, etc.)

    The myth that slavery was a backwards institution is hard to root out; it seems like, of course it had to be backwards, of course it wouldn’t work as well as free labor. But none of its true; slavery was a very successful form of production, and it made massive wealth for white people in the US.

  77. Yes, that’s the point I conceded.

    Noah, the sheer scale of differences of wealth between North and South definitely proves the economic superiority of a modern industrial state over a slave-owning one. This lesson was confirmed around the world. The first country to abolish slavery was Great Britain. It subsequently became the richest country in the world. When Russia abolished serfdom — a land-tied form of slavery – its economy took off.

    This is not to deny the interconnection between the North and slavery.

  78. Again, this is horribly confused Alex. Great Britain’s economy was tightly linked to the cotton trade; it’s massive burst of wealth had everything to do with Southern slavery.

    Southern slavery *was an industrial economy*. It wasn’t preindustrial. Southern planters made huge innovations in rationalization of labor (especially in terms of motivating innovation through carefully regulated torture) and in the development of complex financial instruments. Again, Baptist explains this at some length. I’d urge you to read the book. It’s eye-opening.

  79. During the Civil War, the Union blockade of the South forced desperate mill owners to find alternate sources of cotton. These turned out to be India and especially Egypt. They produced record crops without slavery (although the rural peonage that picked the cotton wasn’t a great improvement.) Egypt was able to finance a large part of the Suez Canal from its windfall.

    And what of cotton production in the South after emancipation? Did it crash?

  80. Alex–

    Sorry for the misunderstanding.

    Noah–

    To add to your point, when I was a kid and learning about the major American inventors–Edison, Bell, etc.–the first name and invention that always came up was Eli Whitney and the cotton gin.

  81. But how long did it stay crashed? Is cotton production in, say, 1900 lower than in 1859? You’d also have to factor in phenomena like the boll weevil infestation that almost destroyed the entire cotton industry (forcing a diversification of agriculture) and the rise of international competition from central Asia.

  82. As for Eli Whitney and the cotton gin — that just proves my point: the more you industrialise, the better your productivity.

  83. Cotton productivity basically never recovered. U.S. never became the most efficient producer of cotton again, as it had been during slavery. I think actual amount of cotton produced remained below slavery levels for decades.

    The cotton gin removed a bottleneck in production; you could now clean seeds out of the boll faster. But you still needed to up production to get the cotton in the gin. That was done through rationalized labor based on torture.

  84. Alex – “The first country to abolish slavery was Britain. It subsequently became the richest country in the world”

    Technically correct, but in the colonies the British frequently used indentured labour instead.
    And even the theoretically “free” British factory workers were subject to the Master and Servant Act – which involved legal compulsion and allowed for physical punishment – til as late as the 1860s. The idea that British success was due to some sort of more rational, economic system based purely on exchange of contract or whatever is wrong.

    Noah is right – capitalist production has always relied on a high level of compulsion.

  85. “The idea that British success was due to some sort of more rational, economic system based purely on exchange of contract or whatever is wrong.”

    It isn’t. British success compared to other Western economies is due to Britain being the first country to industrialise. Look at France, which had a very similar colonial set-up. The French economy did not catch up with Britain’s until the 1970s.

  86. Not disputing the importance of industrialisation, but arguing that the economy didn’t really operate in the way that bourgeois theory claimed. If the economic system had really operated on the basis of a system of rational exchange,it wouldn’t have required colonialism.

    The French colonial system was similar but smaller, thanks to military defeat. British overseas expansion – which was necessary for industrialisation – couldn’t have happened without massive state aggression.

  87. The historian A.J.P.Taylor has demonstrated that, throughout the time of Empire, it was Britain that created the majority of the wealth, and that net transfers of wealth ran from Britain to the colonies, not vice-versa. Of course, an economy is a complex web of
    interdependance…

  88. I’m pretty skeptical of that. Taylor’s quite old at this point, and I don’t think that jibes with more recent things I’ve read. Which book is this where he argues that?

  89. While waiting for Alex’s reply, it’s mentioned in passing in his essay, “Economic Imperialism” (http://www.panarchy.org/taylor/imperialism.1952.html), where he discusses J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism:

    “Their measuring-stick was Power, not Profit. When they disputed over tropical African territory or scrambled for railway concessions in China, their aim was to strengthen their respective empires, not to benefit the financiers of the City. Hobson showed that Imperialism did not pay the nation.”

    It’s certainly not cast in stone and specific histories like M. Mukerjee’s Churchill’s Secret War dispute the whole idea in relation to India and the Bengali famine. More general histories like Cain and Hopkins’ “British Imperialism” seem not entirely convinced by it either.

  90. Thank you, Suat. It’s over 30 years since I read that essay, so I was scrambling to find it!

    BTW, Noah, Taylor died in 1990.

  91. Well, its not really a question of relative wealth, but rather how it was was acquired; what I mean is, industrialisation was a qualitatively new form of production, and however much wealth it generated, it requires initial investment. Colonisation and slavery were necessary to provide that primitive accumulation of capital.
    And I’d argue that legal compulsion of various kinds were necessary to its smooth functioning after that.

    But I should probably have a look at that Taylor piece before commenting further…

  92. Yeah… Hobson’s argument seems based on the period of formal imperialism from about the 1870s on. I was thinking more of the late 18th century and early 19th, the period of British ascendancy, when colonialism was absolutely essential; industrialisation began with cotton, which required the slave trade,the colonies in the West Indies and India.
    And, as it happens, the plantations in the southern US, which I expanded from the 1790s on due to British demand for raw materials.

    Some of what Hobson says about the later period – about imperial aggrandisement and so on – sounds right, but its worth noting how the British and French fought to hold on to some colonies and not others…

  93. On that subject, Sean, after the victory of the American-French alliance in the War of Independence, in peace negotiations France was offered the return of certain colonies it had lost in the Seven Years’War to Britain.

    Essentially, they could choose between Martinique and Canada.

    They chose Martinique, of course…

  94. And I always thought the French could have got more for Louisiana!

    You can sort of see a (very short term) economic rationale there, Alex, with the Martinique sugar trade offering quick returns…. maybe?
    But I think it may be harder to separate out the economic and political bases for imperialism than that Hobson theory (or this brief exchange) makes out. As you say above, a complex web of interdependence.

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