This is one of the most engaging podcasts I've heard in quite a while. Conversation includes author Caitlin Flanagan and First Amendment Attorney Greg Lukianoff (From FIRE - The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). The topics are varied but repeatedly come back to free speech. Flanagan claims that far too many college students don't understand the importance or free speech and the First Amendment.
A few weeks ago, NPR offered a program on "free speech" in which none of the participants took a strong stand in favor of free speech.
In this video, Matt Taibbi (Journalist/Commentator), Nadine Strossen (former President of the ACLU), Amna Khalid (Carlton College History Professor) and Nico Perrino (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) respond to the lopsided NPR presentation. Each of these participants recoiled at the idea that there is such a thing as a "free speech absolutist," an idea repeatedly promoted by the NPR panel. Matt Taibbi explains:
This idea that we're free speech absolutist is something that's been invented by people who are against the who want to regulate speech in a way that i think is new and very repressive. They're mischaracterizing the positions of people like all of us.
Nadine Strossen further explains:
Government may restrict speech if but only if it can satisfy an appropriately heavy burden of proof if it can show that the particular restriction is necessary and the least speech restrictive alternative in order to promote some countervailing goal of compelling importance whether that goal be public safety for example or individual safety and when you think about it that just makes common sense of course most of us would be willing to trade off free speech for you know public safety or even national security but it's a fool's choice to give up free speech if we're not gaining safety in return or worse yet as is often the case if the censorship no matter how well intended does more harm than good which is typically the case.
Taibbi points out that the NPR panel has no solutions to the "problem" that speech is often unruly and offensive:
It's so important to our conception of what our society is all about this idea of of being able to express ourselves that is preferable to the alternative. The alternative is that somebody would have to regulate the speech and that's the problem is once once we get into who's doing that regulating that that's where we get to the scary part and they don't address any of that. All they want to do is, in a very narrow way, say "Oh this libertarian hands off approach to to speech regulation doesn't work." But it's so much more complicated than that.
Amna Khalid accuses the NPR panelists of being myopic, over-focusing on the relatively functional state of American culture compared to the many vast oppressed populations in other parts of the world, where free speech is desperately needed:
In our current moment if you cast your eyes beyond the pond and look at the rest of the world you will see so many examples of how limitations on free speech are a way of shutting down the rights of minorities.
I've listened to the NPR presentation and repeatedly heard the NPR panel members attack the straw man they labeled "Free Speech Absolutist." It is as if those panel members never heard of widely recognized restrictions on free speech, including libel laws, incitement laws, laws prohibiting speech constituting hostile work environments and laws prohibiting fraud. I highly recommend this discussion:
Jonathan Rauch, author of The Constitution of Knowledge, discussing free speech with Andrew Sullivan:
Books like mine, I hope, and work like yours [Sullivan's], will sound the alarm and show the way out, show that our arguments are strong, that pluralism is really the only path to a peaceful, productive and knowledgeable society. What the purists have to argue is only eternal warfare, in which arguments are not resolved. And the casualties are either physical human bodies, or ostracism, or ignorance, or chilling.
Even if we don't win that argument right now, I keep pointing out to people: Remember the notions of free speech and free thought and all the rigors of science? These things are profoundly counterintuitive. The idea that speech is blasphemous, heretical, wrongheaded, offensive--add your adjectives--that speech is like that? That ideas like that should not only be allowed, but affirmatively protected, is the strangest and weirdest, and probably the craziest social idea that was ever invented. And it's only rescued by the fact that it's also the most successful social idea that was ever invented by a country mile. I would argue that it put an end to the creed wars. It gave us knowledge. It gave us finally some peace. And the result of that counter-intuitiveness is that you and I and our children, metaphorically, and our grandchildren and their grandchildren, will have to get up every morning and defend these ideas from scratch against a new generation that, for whatever new reason, emotional safety-ism or critical race theory or something else, that they don't get it. And we just have to be cheerful about that because, historically speaking, we've done incredibly well for about two and a half centuries. This is a template in the history of the human species.
You think you're open-minded? What if the North American Man-Boy Love Association wanted to distribute a newsletter in your town? What if they wanted to hold a local parade celebrating pederasty?
I am currently studying social psychology in graduate school, and I'm particularly interested in political psychology. One of my present research interests is political tolerance. "Political tolerance" refers to individuals' willingness to extend equal civil liberties to unpopular groups.
When political scientists and psychologists measure political tolerance, they often probe individuals for their ability to withstand the most offensive, outlandish groups and speech possible. For example, a liberal-minded person may be asked whether they would be willing to allow a rally for the Klu Klux Klan or some extremist, militaristic group. Paradoxically, a truly tolerant person must be willing to allow racially intolerant speech.
Political tolerance plays a cornerstone role in functioning democracies (at least, we think so). If voters can strip away the civil liberties of disliked political groups, those liberties lay on precarious ground indeed. If we cannot tolerate the words of anarchists or members of the Westboro Baptist Church, then we do not really believe in the boundlessness of speech at all.
Academics say as much. In reality, voters are not so tolerant.
The Center for Inquiry has just announced a new campaign to help defend free speech--particularly speech critical of religion--from suppression. The Campaign for Free Expression includes a website designed as a forum to report and monitor censorship. The site also publishes the kind of religious (and political) criticism likely to find itself censored. http://www.centerforinquiry.net/newsroom/center_for_inquiry_launches_campaign_for_free_expression/