What's The True Value of Freedom of Speech?
Abandoning free speech absolutism... To save free speech absolutism
A frequent cliché among free speech absolutists is “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Meaning as long as we are fully free to discuss any & all ideas, we will always expose the bad ideas for what they are. Everyone will turn away from them and the best arguments will always win out. I am an avowed free speech absolutist myself, but I distinguish myself from fellow “free speech absolutists” in one important regard. Their argument about sunlight being the best disinfectant is nonsense. Rather than casting light on the true value of free speech, their sunlight cliché clouds the issue with an argument that simply does not stand up to scrutiny.
“The marketplace of ideas” is another cliché essentially describing the same thing. That like any free market of goods and services, a marketplace of ideas will cause people to flock to the best ideas and the bad ideas will sit on the shelves collecting dust until one day, into the trash bin of history, these bad ideas go. But I must say, these ideas appear to me to be obviously untrue.
Conversely we hear another argument from free speech absolutists that I don’t think holds up. The idea that censorship doesn’t work. A formulation of the argument may go, that when you censor people they take their speech elsewhere. So if you ban everyone that is genuinely racist they all go be racist together somewhere else. They go and become an echo chamber where they all agree, removed from the marketplace of ideas required to counter their arguments.
What’s more, when all the real racists are gone, you’ll ban people with milder unpleasant ideas. They will have nowhere to go, so they just end up going where the racists went and over time many of them become racist too and in that way, racism grows and festers and reemerges stronger than it was before. Then when they reemerge they begin to grab hold of the mainstream who are not inoculated against racist arguments by the disinfectant of sunlight.
Essentially, we need to keep our racists where we can see them.
I believe these arguments, that freedom of speech works and censorship doesn’t are not just less than correct. That precisely the opposite is true and that this contradictory argument is in fact the most compelling argument in favor of free speech absolutism.
While several reasonable definitions of freedom of speech exist, my own definition of free speech is simply the right to speak free from violence or coercion. The importance of this definition comes in understanding why free speech is not just useful, or preferable in so-called western liberal democracies…
(Editor’s Note: I feel compelled to pause for the incredibly petty reason of pointing out that I hate this term and chose to employ it solely for brevity’s sake. Because it is much easier to simply use it and immediately disavow it, than it would be to list the surprisingly high numbers of ways a phrase like ‘western liberal democracy’ is objectively wrong and subjectively problematic.)
…but indeed, freedom of speech is a necessary pre-requisite to the very creation of a liberal-democracy; as well as an indispensable variable in their continued existence. I contend that a reliance on persuasion, by way of a voluntary exchange of ideas is not essential because it is the most effective of all options. (Even if it was, defending a deontological principle with a consequentialist argument is not a winning strategy.)
But I digress….again…
The essentialist value of freedom of speech is entirely unrelated to its efficacy. Rather, free speech is essential because alternate methods of persuasion, like force, violence, coercion or blackmail are recognizably mala in se (a Latin phrase derived from natural law meaning ‘a wrong in itself’).
The phrase is used to refer to conduct assessed as sinful or inherently wrong by nature, independent of regulations governing the conduct. Therefore, common morality would dictate, ipso facto, they should be disparaged and prevented. As such, a voluntary exchange of ideas is the best means of persuasion purely because it is the only one that is not morally repugnant. And that’s why we should value it. But we shouldn’t romanticize it. And that’s what too many free speech activists do. They are deluded into the belief that we choose persuasion because it works best. But if that was true there would be no temptation to censor, coerce or bribe.
Furthermore, we need to be honest. Every time speech increases, be it through liberalization or technological progress we do see a proliferation of bad ideas. We also find bad ideas have a bad habit of sticking around.
Since its inception in the 15th Century, the Gutenberg printing press was responsible for a proliferation of new knowledge and ideas, and the affordability of books that could now be printed en masse led to exponential growth in literacy everywhere this technology reached, because books became items of relative affordability, especially compared to the cost of their predecessor, the handwritten manuscript, which were a luxury item often purchased by the rich—not to read, but merely as an obscene demonstration of wealth and status. Such advances constitute a great leap forward by any metric.
But much of what came off the printing Press in these early days was undoubtedly destructive.
Like the Malleus Maleficarum-- A book whose titles translates as ‘The Hammer of Witches’—It has the dubious distinction of being the most famous treatise ever written on the subject of witchcraft. This book legitimatized the persecution of so-called witchcraft across Europe. A sort of collective mania took hold that lead to the deaths of anywhere between 12,000 to 45,000 people. Persecuted for a crime they couldn’t possibly have been guilty of.
On the other hand, censorship does seem to be very effective. Look at what happened to Donald Trump when he got ex-communicated from all social media on January 8th 2021. He promised to start his own social media page. This ended up being a blog page on his personal website. An analysis of his blog page showed a total of around 212,000 total interactions combined on all his posts. Back when Trump was on social media every single tweet he sent would get hundreds of thousands of interactions. The blog page was so ineffective that after a few months he just took it down. This same kind of soft censorship would go on to very effectively marginalize people such as Alex Jones, Stefan Molyneux, Owen Benjamin & Milo Yiannopoulos. These were all individuals who had a massive cultural influence, largely thanks to their social media presence until each of them, like Donald Trump, had their ability to communicate their ideas through social media revoked. These are all people whose relevance in the mainstream has virtually disappeared since then.
With the peculiar exception of Donald Trump who only really became relevant to mainstream media once again relatively recently around the time Joe Biden, not content with successfully silencing and marginalizing his political opponent, decided it was a good idea to try and destroy him through transparently political prosecutions.
But this larger trend of very successfully silencing dissident political voices is by no means a new or unique phenomenon, brought on by our modern age of social media.
For example, in the midst of the English Civil War, the Parliamentary party attempted to censor the book trade through the Licensing Order of 1643. In his Areopagitica (1644), John Milton, although an ardent supporter of the Parliamentary cause, argued passionately on behalf of allowing the full force of free debate to sustain both liberty and truth. Yet in a treatise on free expression he devoted a substantial portion of the work to recriminations of the dangers of censorship. He wrote:
To “know” truth because of coercion was without merit, and Parliament would err grievously if it sought, even on behalf of the good, “to suppress all this flowery crop of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this city…to bring a famine upon our minds again.”[1]
The efficacy of free speech is at best a mixed bag that can’t always be relied on to work for the better. On the other hand, censorship does work and people who are against censorship because they claim it is ineffective do themselves and the cause of free speech a great disservice.
~Furthermore, Carthago Delenda Est~
[1] Milton John. Areopagitica; a Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing. 1644.