The strangeness of free speech

...The answer would make a very full chapter of the history of bad conscience in our time...

...In the light of reason, the honor paid to those things is an infamy...

...Why...

...several have since been overturned in the courts...

...The garish tabloid story that advances no public cause and destroys a reputation, the innocuous gesture of loyalty that somebody will refuse in principle, the interminable committee meeting tortured into a last hour of debate by a pedantic scruple: we have all at moments reacted against these things...

...Often unused to power, and far from the secure possession of power when they use the freedom, they are nevertheless resourceful, and the resources they count on are intellectual...

...restrictions on speech will be out of the question, for the very temptation to speak wrongly or offensively will have been uprooted from human nature...

...These moves to favor new tests of conformity and adjustment are based on a distrust of liberty, a distrust that can only corrupt the spirit of equality...

...They may belong to a religious persuasion that is not sanctioned or encouraged or otherwise approved by society...

...The modern challenge to the common sense of blasphemy came from a few liberal societies in which a kind of spiritual equality, felt by someone testifying rightly against someone who had testified wrongly, appeared to carry with it a promise of other sorts of emancipation...

...And yet, we will get nowhere in these troubles if we refuse to recognize, somewhere in the same movement, the misdirected anxiety of the powerless...

...It would be partial to mention these actions against free speech as if they were unrelated to other public innovations: "diversity training" at law firms, newspapers, and the most image-conscious of the big corporations...

...Experience has not taught them that good behavior always succeeds, and like Thoreau they fear that if they have anything to regret, it will be their good behavior...

...There are sacred things which nobody is permitted to speak against, on pain of being cast out of society, or reclassified among the never-to-be-understood, the mad...

...One can detect in this train of thought the seeds of the argument that led some universities to adopt speech codes...

...It entails a suppression of the desire to silence or somehow restrict the opinions of people with whom you disagree, a decision to allow their speech in spite of your disagreement, and in spite of the evil effects which may come from their exercise of the freedom...

...Because Americans today think of the bonds of any community as fragile, we pass quickly from possessive to protective feelings about the communities we belong to...

...The distrust expresses a kind of common sense that was universal before the Enlightenment...

...Milton's belief that "that virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure"—this belief, and the sentiment that prompted a nation of dissenters to convert it from a heresy to a constitutional practice, will have been reduced again to a heresy...

...It is something we learn...

...The right to speak hardly matters unless there are people willing to use it with courage, and the total freedom of a society that tolerates many kinds of speech is judged, as well, by the things besides speech which it agrees to tolerate or to suppress...

...But it is hard to imagine anyone who ever felt the impulse and used the chance to speak his mind or to speak her mind could feel that this was merely a negotiable pleasure...

...This is a specious reason, plausible enough to carry momentary conviction with persons who know that they value the free market, and who wonder how far they should care for other freedoms...

...At the bottom of the ministrations of the speech regulators, which would balance the violence of "remedial repression" against "the subtler violence of insult," we are not wrong to suspect the usual power-hunger of ideologists...

...the language of criticizing or answering back—is impotent and must remain passive in the face of certain experiences of mental or emotional suffering, or a temporary but unwelcome subordination to authority...

...the new definitions of words carrying the force of action, which have also been tried out in court cases in recent years...

...I thought the book was in bad taste but my English teacher told me it was a totalizing discourse that constituted an assault on my self-esteem...

...An unlikely class of persons—professionals, whose daily sustenance comes from words and ideas—have directed the strongest suspicion against the power of words...

...To have known what free speech is, not lazily but vividly, for oneself, with the urgency of a practical need, is to see it as a necessity...

...A large part of the motive for toleration in speech, as in other walks of life, is self-respect...

...Policies are worked up from the reactions by people FALL • 1996 • 117 Notebook who, if they ever profited from the advice of anyone who opposed their will, were at the time unconscious of the fact, or conscious of it only as an irritant...

...and the other side has never been wrong...

...but consider the resemblances between these statements: "I thought it was a rude way to talk but a lawyer told me it was actionable...

...Language, on this assumption, inevitably serves as a tool of oppression, unless its uses are carefully patrolled...

...They see evil and think, and say, "Stop it...

...There is a circular relation, bewildering to those who stand outside it, between the authority of reason, judgment, conscience—all those Enlightenment goods—and the decline of the moral prohibitions once enforced in the name of things more sacred than life...

...We do not allow others to speak against our inclinations because we have made a cost-benefit analysis of the matter, nor do we let them speak simply because— though this is a better reason—we have imagination and we believe in the power of example and we see there will be occasions when we shall need them to do the same for us...

...And even as we guard against the conformity that follows from looking on every political arFAIL • 1996 • 119 Notebook gument as having one right side, we ought to remember how much of learning and teaching is not involved with debate in any ordinary sense...

...People are no more born with this kind of self-respect than they are born with any other virtue...

...Far more important among the enemies of free speech are those who control the power that speech may threaten, and in a commercial democracy like ours, that means people with a lot of money, or with close ties to business or government...

...But nobody has ever in a hard moment wanted to defend free speech for this reason...

...This taking of speechless offense against offensive speech is a wholly intelligible reflex, much easier to explain and less artificial than the principle of toleration: that is the first thing to realize about it...

...120 • DISSENT...

...These are not people who "see evil and think law...

...At the moment of outrage, the right response is not to engage in controversy but to aim a loaded accusation that is sure to carry more than verbal force...

...the language of regret or self-reproach...

...It is sometimes said, very mistakenly and shallowly, that the reason we ought to defend liberty of speech is that we live in something called a free market of ideas, and if we deprive ourselves of even one possible hint toward a better idea than 118 • DISSENT Notebook we yet possess, we shall suffer accordingly as bad shoppers, or shopkeepers, of ideas...

...If, finally, we side with Milton and Wollstonecraft and Mill, and we say again that the possibility of disagreement about anything is a necessary condition of intellectual life, that is not to say that it could ever be the sufficient condition...

...One place we learn it outside the family has always been school...

...Much of the cultural and educational establishment in America falls into this category: rule-followers, men and women of prudence who wear the coat of convention in all its changing shapes...

...Lawyers, social scientists, scholars of the arts and letters, and psychotherapists or psychological counselors have become the vanguard in lobbying for and actually drafting restrictive rules on speech...

...Self-sacrifice, it has been said, enables us to sacrifice others without blushing, and those who are for restricting speech certainly have this kind of consistency: the pleasure they ask others to give up, they mean to give up themselves...

...and they are right...

...I refuse to put a stop to the words of someone whose speech does not actively threaten me because I refuse to see myself as a person so resourceless as to require such coercive helps...

...Or, just as commonly, though it is a case we tend to neglect, they may be people in isolation, who were so aroused by the falseness of some word or deed they witnessed that they felt at once their surest way of leveling their antagonist was with words: they had no doubt of their power to do it in words, though actions, the procedures of official litigation and grievance, might fail...

...What shall we say about those who want to restrict this freedom...

...In despair, they look to a future in which an implicit code of decency will govern all actions...

...All these sentences share a current assumption that language— the language of reaction or rebuke...

...I thought it was an unpleasant experience but my therapist told me it was a trauma...

...Many such codes were passed in the late eighties and early nineties...

...A climate of persistent and quarrelsome confrontation tells us only a little about the society that tolerates such a practice...

...If they have resources, they are not intellectual...

...But one feature of the present moment deserves to be noticed...

...But there are in American society, and have been in every democracy, numbers who remain lukewarm because they simply have not found themselves in a minority at any time on any issue affecting free speech...

...Finally, in a society where the disparities of education are great, those who fear the effects of speech may include people who sense among the powers arrayed against them the mysterious power of words...

...Many kinds of people have felt this necessity, and some generalizations about them are possible...

...Its scope was never established once and for all, and its maintenance is not more threatened now than at many times in our history...

...The truth in many cases is that they have never experienced its value for themselves...

...Those who care most for the political liberty to speak as freely as they think are, often, politically on the dissident side—they are people who do not see their views routinely carried in the usual channels of opinion...

...For this the only cure is education...

...A university is often supposed to be a community of an elusive and peculiarly intimate sort...

...We know that fellow feelings can easily be spoilt—for example, by a wrong or ugly line of talk...

...Every heroic case of free speech has been viewed from the other side as a case of blasphemy...

...People in this state distrust the usual behavior of those in power and the bad behavior of anyone...

...These are the benign inheritors and promoters of business as usual, and they are right not to think themselves intolerant, for they will assist any tolerance that is compatible with a quiet life...

...Most people think it is natural to feel this way...

...The freedom embodied for the United States in the First Amendment was never a settled fact of life so much as an ideal, an ideal that is better, we may think, for having been stated briefly, clearly, and in a place where its meaning is hard to miss...