Why should we care about suppressed and chilled speech on important issues of the day? Emily Elkins of the Cato Institute offers the statistics and a clear analysis in “Most Americans Are Scared Stiff to Talk Politics. Why?”
There are many reasons to resist this authoritarian urge to squash dissent. The first is that scientific progress, and by extension, the improvement of human well‐being generally, requires free thought and open discourse. As Jonathan Rauch explains in his book, “Kindly Inquisitors,” the scientific method breaks down when people become reluctant to ask questions, be creative, challenge each other, and seek out and understand evidence.
Further, as Thomas Chatteron Williams explained in a New Yorker interview, the culture of canceling signals to people what the boundaries of “acceptable” ideas are or else suffer severe economic and emotional punishment. Thus many “steer far clear of the boundary,” causing a “narrowing…stifling effect on not just speech but on thought,” he explained.
Yet silencing people and stifling free thought isn’t an effective long‐run strategy. It rarely changes minds. It just shuts down civil discourse and prevents people from having opportunities to modify their ideas in the face of new information. Instead, people hold onto their opinions, and just sweep them under the rug.
Political opponents’ disengagement doesn’t necessarily mean victory. Americans still vote. And their political views, silent or expressed, affect how they vote. Persuasion is necessary to change how people think and thus who and what they vote for. But persuasion is hard and requires open dialogue.
Social psychologists have found evidence that we aren’t very good at updating our opinions by ourselves. We need other people we respect to ask us to explain our views and then challenge us with new considerations. It’s typically through this back and forth process that we update our views when people we trust present us with new, compelling information.
But this only works when we feel comfortable to engage in a dialogue. Thus it is only with open dialogue that people’s opinions can be examined, understood, or reformed. Thereby, the best long‐term strategy is persuasion, not silencing. And persuasion requires open debate.
Damn, it feels good to read this. I’ve been saying it for the past few years. Seems to me that shutting out (eg, Facebook bans) seemingly wacky theories and driving them to the fringes of the internet just further confirms and convinces their adherents of the marginalization that drives their resentments and hatred.
As a life-long liberal I find myself ashamed that much of this comes from people who identify themselves as liberals. My approach is classic: If you disagree with me, I want you to speak more and louder. If I am correct that you, my opponent, are uttering rubbish, this will become more evident to audiences the more you speak. If I am wrong, then you are making a mistake by stifling my speech. My speech will be the strongest argument you have for your own position.
On a private internet forum, I’m in a non-stop war with a group of highly-educated idiots. Yes, there is police brutality in the U.S. Yes, the U.S. justice system produces disparate results by race. Yes, police need to be held accountable for their actions. Their claim is that encounters between police officers of any race with African-American citizens usually result in police violence against the African-Americans. And, a large number of police-citizen interactions involving non-black citizens also result in unlimited police violence. Thus, racism and violence are out of control and are both ubiquitous and systemic in the U.S. justice system. The problem is that the data say the opposite.
There are about 800,000 police officers from various agencies and departments in the U.S. They have about 325 million police-citizen interactions each year. The overwhelming number of these do not result in violence against anyone. The myth that racist US police actively hunt unarmed black men to shoot and kill is preposterous. The best data are held in a searchable database at the Washington Post. They show that a maximum of fourteen unarmed black men were killed by police officers in the U.S. in 2019. If 800,000 racist police officers made it a priority to hunt down and kill unarmed black men, then we’re in trouble. The police are fundamentally incompetent at the task. Statistically, the incidents of police violence are outliers.
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I’m then hit with a preference for Youtube videos over empirical data. You can’t fix stupid.
Bill, publishing these accurate statistics is seen as inappropriate by many left leaning media outlets. They would rather limit their information to anecdotes that are in keeping with their preferred narrative. Outlets like the NYT are doing this so consistently that one can oniy assume that this conduct is intentional. I fear that this is evacuating the middle: We have intentionally dishonest media on the left and the right. Where is a concerned citizen supposed to go to hear news that offers evidence from all angles and allows the reader to make up his or her mind?
Erich, I have no idea how I came to live in a country dominated by mendicants. Trump seems compelled to exaggerate, then to double down on false information. NYT and WaPo have given up any semblance of journalism and become PR departments for the Loons of the Left. Trump cronies seem to cross their fingers as soon as they are asked, “How are you today?” The Democrats have lost all right to govern because they denied reality of urban violence until polls began telling them they were being harmed among voters.
My greatest fear for the 2020 presidential election is that someone is going to win.