Guest post: Exploiting what looked like a principle of free speech
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Weeds.
do they agree that wrong-think should be suppressed and never analysed?
Well, “our” opinion about one specific example of one specific view being presented in one specific context doesn’t extrapolate to whether “we” agree that all “wrongthink” should be suppressed and “never” analysed.
For example, most people agree that Holocaust denialism no longer merits the legitimacy of a platform at a respectable academic institution. This isn’t at all because Holocaust denialism is supposedly “wicked” and should be suppressed: it’s because such views have already been aired plenty, and analyzed to death, and there’s by now such broad, overwhelming evidence against them that the subject is done and buried. There’s nothing left to argue, and it’s reasonable to assume that anyone arguing so is not presenting a reasonable viewpoint in good faith. This is why, famously, the tobacco lobby deliberately kept offering up speakers to deny that cigarettes cause cancer, long after they knew otherwise. They were cynically exploiting what superficially looked like a principle of free speech to suppress years of medical research consensus, to the detriment of society’s public health, and the probable death of countless thousands.
I can see how some people might fancy themselves offering up a neat exercise in showing off their open-mindedness and evenhandedness by, say, inviting a Holocaust denier to speak on campus, but I think it could much better be argued that doing so just undermines the values that any respectable academic institution would presumably uphold.
How this overlays onto your AIDS denialist example depends on a few factors:
– how broad is the consensus that AIDS denialist theories have already received broad, thorough review and been properly rejected by overwhelming evidence, which has received overwhelming consensus in the field?
– what kind of institute was this person speaking at, and would him airing his views in that environment be seen to be undermining the insitute’s credibility and/or giving undue credibility to the speaker’s views?
To sum it up briefly: not all views are appropriate for all forums. I by no means believe that Holocaust denialism or flat-earthism or AIDS denialism should be suppressed on, say, the entire Internet. Because free speech, etc. But there’s plenty of room to evaluate the appropriateness of platforming certain topics within certain environments.
However, that threshold — the threshold where a topic should no longer merit being treated as an ongoing, open question, and therefore should not merit some platforms that would grant it that legitimacy — must be taken very seriously. We’ve seen students slip into believing that any views they find “wicked” should “be suppressed and never analysed,” to use your words. I obviously think that needs to be rolled way back.
Exactly.
We live in a world of finite resources, including credibility. Every time you give someone a platform, you are spending some of those resources, whether it’s the physical space, the staff time, the speaker budget, the attention span of your community, and/or your credibility as an institution.
There are thousands of crackpots out there churning out emails to physicists explaining how they have figured out that Einstein Was Wrong, that their pet Time Cube Theory or whatever explains life, the universe, and everything, etc. etc. And free speech demands that they are allowed to operate their badly-designed web sites without being shut down by the Grand Council of Physicists or whoever. But that doesn’t mean that they deserve broader exposure. All of them would be delighted to be invited to give a seminar at Prestigious University’s Department of Physics, and would forever brag about it afterward, and naive third parties would think “well, this guy was invited to speak at P.U., he can’t be a crackpot!”
There are multiple considerations at work aside from just the merits of the proposed speaker’s views, of course. Sometimes a ridiculous view is so popular that there is a real need to expose it to rigorous criticism — the value in having current believers hear the criticism outweighs the cost of potentially exposing more people to the nonsense. Creationism arguably falls into this category, though I think it’s very case-specific: the balance would be different for a small college in the Bible Belt than a prestigious research institution.
In a just world, Donald Trump would have so little support that Joe Biden could safely ignore him and cruise to a general election victory. That’s not the world we live in, so (assuming they are the respective nominees), Biden will have to at least be willing to debate him (though I would not be shocked if no debate occurs because they can’t agree on the rules/format). But that doesn’t mean that Biden should elevate RFK, Jr. or Marianne Williamson by debating them. (And in fact, I’m not aware of any incumbent president debating a primary challenger.)
I think an important consideration in making such judgements is an appreciation of the extent to which (even intelligent) people treat views (even purely empirical views) as having moralised essences triggering perpetration of the genetic fallacy. As a neatly reflexive example: eighteenth and nineteenth century race science could be refuted and excluded from discussion, but its dead hand was still observable in (perhaps only lay) palaeo-anthropological discussions as to whether positing that a non-negligible fraction of the systematic genetic divergence between those populations colloqially called races has its origin in differing patterns of hybridization of homo-sapiens-sapiens and non-homo-sapiens-sapiens should be stigmatized as weak multi-regionalism.
Post scriptum: I recall Richard Dawkins tangentially making a similar point in The Blind Watchmaker when discussing the origin of life in the chapter Origins and Miracles. There he takes special care to disavow the emotive and fallacious abuse of Copernicanism in order to introduce a disussion that makes correct allowance for observer bias in assessing the probability of abiogenesis.
Personally, I find BW the most appealing of Dawkins’s books. I don’t pretend to guess the level of success it had in his stated aim of persuading those who were skeptical of, or hostile to, evolution, of its truth; but I am confident that it had immense success in explaining evolution to those who merely thought they aready understood it – being one of them myself.
[…] a comment by Screechy Monkey on Exploiting what looked like a principle of free […]
Excellent post.
Shortly after reading this post, I read today’s Rhymes With Orange comic strip. Nothing deep, but perhaps relevant and funny.
https://m.arcamax.com/thefunnies/rhymeswithorange/s-2820290
But who sets the threshold? The students you’re talking about can justify their “no debate” in the same way by saying that the issues have already been discussed, that there’s plenty of hard evidence (“it’s science”), and therefore the subject is done.
I’m not from America, and I just recently learned about the First Amendment. At first, I was confused, because the Amendment protects, for example, Nazi views. But then I started to think that it makes sense.
So, the First Amendment sets that threshold in America, I guess. That’s why public universities can’t deplatform a Holocaust denier who was invited by some student society. However, gender critical views are also protected by the Amendment.
Moreover, a lot of people, particularly many young people, may have missed out on all these many discussions of incorrect views. Therefore, all of these views should continue to be discussed and analyzed.
Of course, there is some harm in the speech of Holocaust deniers, climate change deniers, or pro-lifers. But perhaps the benefits of a functioning free speech system outweigh that.
Re #6
“Who sets the threshold” is the problem, isn’t it?
Re the First Amendment, a lot of Americans get confused about what it says, but it prohibits only government infringement of free speech. There is, however, a societal value of free speech that is prevalent in the US, and people sometimes advocate it via (incorrect) reference to the First Amendment.