I've written about freedom of speech extensively in all manner of forums, but the one thing that has become clear to me lately, is that people are genuinely uninterested in the philosophical underpinnings of freedom of speech. Today they would rather quote an XKCD comic, than John Stuart Mill's seminar work On Liberty.
Because of this, I've decided to try to reframe the original notion of freedom of speech, into a term I coined: Open Ideas.
Open Ideas is nothing more than what freedom of speech has always been historically: a philosophical declaration that the open contestation of ideas is the engine of progress that keeps moving society forward.
Today the tyranny of the majority believes freedom of speech is anything but that. They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite. The great thinkers argued that if people are afraid of expressing unpopular opinions, that is functionally the same as government censorship: ideas are suppressed, society stagnates, and progress is halted.
So far I have not yet heard any sound refutation of any of these ideas. All people do is repeat the aforementioned dogmatic slogan with zero philosophical foundation, or mention First Amendment details, which obviously is not equal to freedom of speech.
How is anything I've stated in any way an inaccurate assessment of what is happening?
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We should tabboo both "freedom of speech" and your proposed "Open Ideas." The contention in these debates is that we have an obligation to forebear from certain courses of action in response to certain speech acts by others. Almost all the discussion of interest is in: what actions? What speech acts? The First Amendment concerns certain actions and certain speech acts but once we go beyond it things rapidly become murky.
Imagine I have a friend A and one day A shared with me some opinion I consider repugnant. So much so it makes me rethink my friendship with A. I act cooler and more aloof in our interactions. I don't invite A to social events as I once would. Did I breach an obligation to A by these actions? Was I obliged to continue being A's friend? Does it depend on the details of what they said?
Go a step further. I accurately relay A's remark to other individuals who are mutual friends. They decide to end their friendship with A, similarly to me. Did our mutual friends have an obligation to remain friends with A? Did I have an obligation not to relate true information to my friends?
To the extent we may accurately portray A as being our feeling censored, that someone has breached a moral obligation, who did so and how did they do it?
I hate to make everything into an object level thing but, I think it really does depend on whether there is a broad social consensus that A's opinion really is repugnant.
There is a desire in the post-enlightenment liberal universalism to insist that everything to be resolved on the meta level -- that one has to adopt a rule without any concrete referents and then to accept every substitution into them.
And, quite frankly, this is in general a wonderful invention. Hoisting these things into a second order algebra is a powerful social technology. Here, however, it seems to be taken too far.
I think there’s a very big problem in people not understanding the difference between sharing an opinion and being an asshole about said opinion. I don’t object to free expression of ideas even in contentious situations on controversial topics. You think abortion is baby murder, you are perfectly free to say that. But I think the very concept of politeness and tact and decorum is pretty lost at this point. It’s just devolved from “I don’t agree with you” to “I don’t agree with you and you are subhuman for even entertaining a different idea, and in fact should not be allowed to speak.” And now we have people celebrating a murder with TikTok dances.
I keep thinking back to reading old etiquette books. There was a sense that you really should strive to think of the other person, or others around you as at least as important if not more than you. A society that frowned on being late to a show because walking in late would inconvenience other theater goers would absolutely have something very politely negative to say about the absolute shit show of political and social discourse— even if they do agree that all opinions are protected by free speech. There are lines of decency that just have to be protected and we just can’t seem to separate the idea of an opinion from the expression of that opinion.
It seems obvious to me that the thing producing this slide is a slide in core values between the tribes. As median tribal values diverge, as the gap between the median positions widens, the basis for mutual toleration disappears as well. We tolerate and cooperate with people because doing so is seen as an obvious net-positive. Lots of people on the right celebrated OBL's death at the hands of US forces. Lots of people on the right celebrate the idea of killing pedophiles.
It likewise seems obvious to me that we are not short on manners or etiquette. Progressivism invented entire new fields of manners and etiquette. The problem, again, is that no amount of manners and etiquette is going to cover fundamental incompatibility of values.
Human cooperation is based on shared values. Without the shared values, "cooperation" becomes incoherent. Cooperating for what purpose, to what end? If we can't agree that the ends are good, then cooperation with evil is an act of insanity.
The thing that gets me about this is that, as a leftist/progressive/blue tribe child deep in the blue tribe bubble in the 90s/00s, I was taught that tolerating people with whom we share no core values was an obvious net-positive, because it's only by tolerating such people that we learn the errors in our own values that we are inevitably and necessarily blind to.
Of course, I eventually figured out that the people who taught me this were simply liars who wanted to use this as a tool to force people with very different core values than ours to tolerate and even cooperate with us, without any desire to reciprocate. "When you are powerful, I ask for mercy, etc." and all that. Yet the argument remains just as valid as ever, and so I still insist on being tolerant of values that are are foreign to mine and especially tolerant of values that are hostile to mine.
It does seem like there's something in the human brain that makes crab-bucketing your own tribe to the top by crushing everyone else far more seductive than uplifting your own tribe to the top by improving itself, and I'm not sure if there's a way around that. The one thing I'd say is that I'm highly skeptical of enforcing tolerance through the oppression of an iron fist, because, as someone who wants tolerance, of course I'd believe that it's okay to achieve it by crushing people who disagree with me; I'm biased towards discounting their suffering and stretching logic to justify why they deserve to suffer, and as such, my judgment that "the cost of the suffering of those who were crushed is worth it for the gain in tolerance" isn't credible.
Define "tolerant".
I don't want to eliminate values I consider hostile to mine. I just don't want to live near them, as that is just going to result in lots of conflict. If "tolerance" means sharing power mechanisms and living space, my argument is quite simple:
This is not me trying to generate an argument for why purging anyone who is different is a good idea. Not all or even most values-coordinates are mutually incompatible. There's a wide range of compatibility. Values-incompatibility is not an "I win" button or a tribal superweapon, it is net-loss for everyone involved, we should not be seeking to maximize it. We need to cooperate, because that's where all our good things come from. But if we can't recognize where the cooperation breaks down or isn't possible, we burn value for no purpose and open ourselves up to disaster.
If toleration isn't possible, the alternative isn't annihilation, it's separation. People who can't get along should endeavor to leave each other alone; that's strongly preferable than attempting to exterminate each other. There are values-modification mechanisms other than one group stomping on another; humans observe outcomes and modify, ideological structures that adopt bad values adapt toward better ones over time, even without hard outside pressure, and then maybe in the future reproachment is possible.
But right now, we're at a place in the culture where weaponizing the legal system and organizing lawless violence against the outgroup are on the table. That is, to me, past the point of no return. There is no credible way to un-tolerate these things, to re-establish a taboo, at least not one that I can see.
I find this hard to believe; it is expected that one might want to eliminate threats to oneself.
Separating oneself from the threat might be an acceptable substitute in a vacuum, but again I doubt that it will be a lasting solution; Europeans in particular have a habit of attempting to eliminate values that pose no threat to them but they consider repugnant. Consider the British Raj banning the practice of sati, or USAID funding feminist theater in Central America. Do you think your enemies' values are more like those of the Protestants or those of the Aztec?
There's a bunch of Islamic extremists on the other side of the world. So long as they stay on the other side of the world, why should this be a problem to me? They are far away, they do not rule me, I have nothing particular to gain from ruling them. Why not just leave each other alone?
They should recognize that this is a bad idea and stop doing it. No one has a strong enough claim to moral clarity to impose their morality over the whole world, and if this is a thing people think needs to happen, I agree if and only if it's my morality being imposed. The flaws with this idea should be obvious enough that we can coordinate an end to the practice, even with a considerable amount of values-incoherence.
For one, they seem very interested in ruling you. While the progress they have made towards this end has been entirely thanks to sympathetic elements in your midst, before they were allowed to advance their agenda inside accepted bounds they quite infamously attempted to advance it outside accepted bounds.
It is true that you have little to gain from ruling them. However, you have plenty to gain from the $72.25 trillion in oil they possess (total value of Middle Eastern oil reserves, per ChatGPT), or any of the other resources they control, or simply the land they inhabit. You talk about how progress is a myth and how there is nothing new under the sun; why would you ignore the eternal appeal of conquest?
A lot of black men would not be in prison right now had they simply realized that crime is a bad idea and they should stop doing it.
Europeans have not needed to coordinate with anyone other than themselves to impose morality for at least 500 years, and modulo China they still don't. To the extent that your enemies' values are a proxy for the values of non-Europeans/East Asians, the threat they pose is a paper tiger.
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In the context of free speech, it would be something like, "Impose no consequences on someone else on the basis of whatever opinions they might express" - e.g. in an alternate universe, if that person hadn't expressed that opinion, you would have treated that person indistinguishably to the real universe where they had.
1st bullet point seems obviously true to me. I'm not sure why that second bullet point would be the case. Why would it trade off directly with the things that make cooperation valuable? Cooperation can offer value in a lot of ways, but one is that when you're cooperating, one potential thing you're substituting is murdering each other (or imposing a pinprick's worth of pain, or anything in between). If we share living space and power mechanisms with people whose values are incompatible with ours, as long as the power struggles between groups with mutually incompatible values stay limited to the agreed upon power mechanisms, we're at least able to keep the living space a living space instead of a killing field, which seems valuable.
Because we cooperate to gain value, and if our definitions of "value" is mutually incompatible, then when the cooperation is aimed at one of these spaces, it's at best burning value for nothing for the side whose values aren't being aimed for, and at worst burning value to lose value.
Bolded for the crucial bit. Power struggles cannot be so limited. People are always going to want more good things and fewer bad things. They are never going to want to perpetuate or multiply bad things at the expense of good things. Once the values get far enough apart, they are always going to recognize that if the bad things can be eliminated, the value that went to producing the bad things can instead produce more good things, and then try to make that happen.
America tried detente between slave states and free states. Slave states wanted more slave states, free states wanted more free states. Slave states wanted to perpetuate and spread Slavery; Free states wanted to abolish it. The result was spiraling escalations as both sides realized that amassing and wielding power was instrumental to maximizing goodness and minimizing badness on their own terms. Laws and norms could not contain the pressure, and failed in sequence until large-scale fratricide broke out.
Non-Communist populations could not figure out how to cooperate with dedicated Communist populations, resulting in numerous rebellions, revolutions and wars. Eventually a cohesive territory of Communist states formed, with a hard border to the non-communist states outside, and this mostly kept the peace until Communist ideology collapsed from its own contradictions. Borders worked.
If this sort of spiral is to be prevented, you have to exert energy to maintain values-coherence, which involves policing the fringes and forcing them back to the center, which is not itself tolerant. Absent such enforced coherence, values drift apart, and the further apart they get the less value cooperation can deliver relative to defection or coordinated meanness.
Having mutually incompatible values doesn't mean that we disagree about the value quality of literally every single thing. Multiple groups with mutually incompatible values can all gain value from a cease-fire. And also from abundance.
Perhaps, but this just looks like a restatement of the supposition "tolerance can't work due to human nature." Perhaps tolerance really is like Communism in that way? It's not out of the question. But, indeed, people want more good things and fewer bad things - that's exactly why one would be motivated to tolerate others who have incompatible values with oneself and limit power struggles to mutually agreed-upon places; it's bad to live in a warzone or to expend resources and blood to crush one's enemies sufficiently to make it peaceful, and it's good to live peacefully. Depending on the specifics, which one's better than the other can change, since the blood lost in crushing one's enemies could be worth it and having to live around people whose values you disagree with could be sufficiently soul crushing to be not worth peace. I just don't think that's always the case, and I also don't think that's the case today in most of the West, or at least America. I do think we have many people actively trying to encourage others to suffer from observing the lack of suffering of [people they disagree with sufficiently], so I could see the argument that it will tip soon or has already tipped, though.
I agree, at the edges, this obviously breaks down, so some shared set of values is needed. If a significant portion of the country considers things like "governance," "democracy," "peace," "stability," "survival," as having negative value, tolerating them becomes quite difficult in a democratic republic like the US. This is why the left's crusade against free speech or just generally tolerating honest discussions is so concerning. That said, I'd still insist on tolerating them, as long as they stay within the bounds of agreed upon mechanisms of power struggle. It's when they break that that it becomes justifiable to not tolerate them. But if they just want to write essays and films about how awesome it would be if we just committed civilizational murder-suicide, in an active effort to recruit more people to their cause, then, well, live and let die. Just don't let them kill.
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