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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Notes -
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.
You can’t even get to the place of agreeing on values if you’re constantly telling yourself and your allies that those other guys are to be destroyed and kept away from power at all costs. I think in the case of the USA the red and blue tribes share quite a lot, but having that conversation is difficult because of the filter bubbles and the attention economy made worse by the rhetoric that the other tribe wants to destroy the country.
Indeed. I think the points of agreement are so broad and deep that they almost vanish into the background. We take them for granted and so the only things that are salient are the outliers.
We can't agree on what constitutes murder, or child abuse. We can't agree on what Rule of Law means. We can't agree on what the Constitution means, or what laws require generally. We can't agree on how to run a Justice system. We can't agree on what is valuable, honorable, decent or depraved. We can't agree on who should be protected or venerated, or who should be disgraced or shunned. The disagreements and others like them cut deep through every facet of our culture, and that culture is visibly coming apart at the seams as a result.
For what it's worth, the cultural divide between red and blue America is still far lesser than the divide between the two great bay colonies that would eventually unite against the crown, even if current levels of general contempt for the other are about the same.
The polities live similar lives, eat similar foods, consume similar mass media, display similar politics on issues primarily determined by age (social security, medicare), enjoy similar past times, have similar incomes, etc. The median red and blue voter are both very identifiably American when mixed into a global pool of people.
Its easy to pick out salacious examples of this not being the case, but how much of this is driven by:
a) The various outrage optimization engines, and b) One's own human tendency to remember the remarkable and aggregate exceptions, ie to over pattern match
How is that a far lesser divide? These things are completely superficial.
People spend the majority of their waking lives largely doing these things, they are important regardless of superficiality. Most people's impact on the world is primarily what they do, not what they think. And even in terms of ideology, MeanRedMan and MeanBlueGuy are most critically, promoters of the American cultural hegemony and distributors of various propaganda.
I'm pretty sure "important" and "superficial" are antonyms. I'm not saying it's impossible for, say, food to be the focus of an irreconcilable difference of values (see: "I will not eat the bugs"), but whether one person eats Itallian and the other Chinese won't affect their ability to cooperate, so declaring there's a smaller gap because people eat the same just sounds bonkers to me.
"American" here only means "originating on roughly the same continent", and it's not even clear how many people of either tribe even want to be cultural hegemons of the world.
Superficial just means surface level or shallow so far as I typically use it. Lots of superficial attributes are important in achieving various outcomes. We haven't elected a president shorter than 6 foot since Jimmy Carter, there's about a 0.04% chance of that happening by random chance if that superficial characteristic is unimportant to electability. Google's "41 shades of blue" experiment likely cost millions in developer time for a superficial change to hyperlink colors. And so on.
There's significantly more baggage that comes with being American than just being born in a particular place. And whether or not an American wants to be an agent for the empire, they are. They spread their American ideas, American perspectives, and other products of the American culture, as effortlessly as they breathe. When most people in the English speaking world go online, they feel like they are digitally transported to America. Not only the people but the structures, the dominant ideas, etc, are all American. Americans on the other hand, almost never seem to experience this sensation.
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