by Robert Rue—
There is conflicting data out there about the degree to which young people are in favor of restricting speech. As a 2019 Knight Foundation and Gallup Poll revealed, the answers you get depend on the precise subject and wording of the question.
Having taught a number of high school courses in recent years that explored issues of speech, I can make the following observations:
- My students are overwhelmingly in favor of (private) school rules that prohibit offensive speech.
- A solid majority of them are also in favor of the government using the law to do the same.
Their justifications for these stances are clear and good-hearted. Offensive speech is harmful. When historically marginalized groups are the recipients of it, that speech is particularly damaging because it exacerbates the already-unequal power dynamics in American society. Plus, the speech of people with societal power is inherently freer than the speech of those who are oppressed, and thus the “marketplace of ideas” that supposedly separates the good ideas from the bad can be a frustrating illusion.
In my view, my students are right about every one of those claims. I’m glad they know those things and glad they care about them.
What worries me is that they’ve never even heard the steel-manned (as opposed to straw-manned) argument for a broad protection of free speech, and thus they have a difficult time conceiving of the danger inherent in restricting speech. If it’s bad speech, why not restrict it?
Let’s put aside the legal distinction between public and private institutions—private institutions can legally restrict speech in ways that public ones can’t—and just focus on the philosophical logic behind a robust protection of speech, including offensive expression.
My students seem certain that they have heard the best argument for free speech and that it’s well… freedom.
And of course, it is, but not in the way they tend to think. Part of the problem is that many defenders of free speech are actually straw-manning their own position. They talk about free speech as if saying whatever you want to say is, in and of itself, a value.
But James Madison and the founders were not under the illusion that speech was always good—they knew that it was often horrible and damaging—and their goal was not to make idiots espousing idiocy feel good about their freedom.
Unlike justice, free speech is not a value. It’s a mechanism.
Defending a person’s right to say even offensive things is a recognition of the fact that not doing so requires an authority to decide what speech is or isn’t offensive.
The founders knew that a government given the power to make a utopia would quickly create its opposite—because of its self-interest and because of its inevitable misperception of the countless factors that would have to be controlled in order to achieve and maintain the perfection. As Thomas Sowell points out, the process by which one tries to achieve cosmic justice is always unjust. Private institutions, including schools, are capable of the same injustice, but at least when they do too much utopianizing, or anything else we don’t like, there are usually other institutions in the same sector to which we can give our business or labor.
So, one purpose of the free speech mechanism is the prevention of authoritarianism.
The second is the expansion of knowledge. A lot of speech in the world will be bad, useless, or merely functional. But some speech will be essential for leading us to new insight. Here’s what’s tricky: the ideas behind many major advances in virtually any field begin as “offensive words.” Just ask Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin. In fact, it’s worth noting that a major advance in human knowledge virtually requires offense in that the new idea will always challenge some accepted doctrine. (In an illustration of this point, Max Planck once quipped that science progresses one funeral at a time.) So, do we really want to operate as if we’ve arrived at the pinnacle of human wisdom and thus empower institutions—with all their self-preserving incentives—to punish all that offends that accepted wisdom? Of all institutions, do we really want schools, which should be dedicated to truth-seeking, to perform that task in a highly restrictive way?
The final purpose of the free speech mechanism—and this is the one that should cause cognitive dissonance for justice-minded young people who readily approve of speech restrictions—is the protection of minority voices. Yes. The protection of minority voices. Women’s suffragists, Vietnam protestors, Civil Rights and gay rights activists all had their rights to free speech sometimes violated, but imagine what would have happened if the central value enshrined in the 1st Amendment had been the prevention of offense. We don’t have to imagine. History provides all the dystopic examples one could want.
Not punishing offense, of course, is not the same thing as not responding to offense. Good schools have effective mechanisms for having conversations about such things. And all institutions with healthy cultures will inevitably have unwritten norms that will, in most cases, effectively guide the way people speak. The codified rules can then be reserved for the most extreme uses of speech—those that incite violence, intimidate or harass.
I suppose it’s come time for the crucial question:
But Mr. Rue, if you were put in charge of a private school, are you saying you would never mete out institutional consequences for offensive speech? I am not. Multiple Supreme Court cases have confirmed that even public schools have a need and therefore a right to restrict speech beyond the legal guidelines that apply to the rest of society if the speech in question is disrupting the environment necessary for learning. So, it’s true, I would occasionally need to restrict speech in defense of this value.
I have now contradicted my entire argument?
No.
Fictionally placed in charge of my fictional school, I—and the committee I would deputize—would indeed be an imperfect arbiter of such justice (I’m glad I’m not a head), but my refusal to punish other cases that also included offense (but that did not rise to the standard of disrupting an educational environment), would limit the potential abuse of my committee’s power and send a clear signal to the community about my school’s respect for free speech. I would also be careful to point out to my school community that it’s anti-educational to allow ideological visions of the world to be protected by claims of offense every time those visions are challenged.
In my real school, for sure, and in many others, students are surrounded by truly good adults who have no tyrannical desires. I think it often seems to these students that we’re only the right set of properly enforced rules away from utopia.
I want them to pursue justice. But I also want them to recognize that they, like their elders, are capable of being lured by good intentions right down the road to intellectual stagnation and authoritarianism, and that, counter to their strongest instincts, the best protection against those dangers may just be a defense of offensive speech.
