The free market of ideas

The First Amendment

Much can be said about the the United States of America - for example the right to bear arms - but one thing they got right was free speech. The First Amendment is so poignant that you should read it yourself:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The idea is simple enough - the people are supposed to rule a country and the government only to represent them. The state must absolutely not be allowed to limit public discourse, because this undermines one of the mechanisms by which the people make sure their representatives are serving them, rather than their own interests.

The Second Amendment

From this perspective, even the Second Amendment makes a fair bit of sense. It is reproduced here:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The Second Amendment is borne out of the exact same fear as the First - that the state could upend the relationship of power between itself and the people it is supposed to serve. Just like the First concerns the flow of information and ideas, the Second concerns physical power. In the context of the late eighteenth century, when a majority of all people lived under the tyranny of a ruling class and a rifle was state of the art military technology, the Second Amendment was meant as an insurance policy against dictatorship.

Vigilante censorship

While the First Amendment deserves as much praise as can be heaped on it, somehow it has also given rise to a very dangerous misunderstanding. In thesis form:

The First Amendment is not synonymous with free speech, nor is it the definition of free speech. The First Amendment deals with the special case of the state censoring speech - as such, given a a government with any power at all, it is a necessary requirement for free speech, but not a sufficient one. There can be other forces limiting speech and they need not be harmless.

Suppose that a publisher declines to print a book, or that a bookstore refuses to stock it - obviously, privately owned businesses are under no obligation to take any and every idea under their wings. On the contrary, part of the service they provide is separating the wheat from the chaff. There is no way to connect this to the First Amendment, unless the government is pressuring them.

But what if the book happens to be for instance The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie and the reason nobody wants to get too closely associated with it is a fear of reprisal from offended Muslims? One could perhaps argue that the real problem in this case would be that of terrorism - as important as free speech might be, personal safety would be the real protagonist in this example.

So let us leave aside the very real killings in the wake of Rushdie's book for a moment. Let us pretend that there is no reason whatsoever to expect violent response to publishing this hypothetical book, but that it indeed is deemed incredibly offensive by some or other interest group. Let us pretend that the book was met with large scale boycotts - of the book itself, of course, but also of its publisher at large and every bookstore willing to put it on display.

Intellectual autonomy

It is easy to imagine how this sort of vigilante censorship can contain an idea, as if though it were a dangerous pathogen. In isolated cases, some sort of Streisand effect might counteract the effects of the boycott. The most loyal customers will surely find ways to work their way around it, perhaps by buying self-published e-books. But nonetheless, the tenacious interest group will sometimes find their tactics effective - a loss of publicity will keep the book away from the undecided middle, translations will be bad business and, ultimately, authors will shy away from writing them in the first place. And in a vicious circle, the boycott tactics will be used ever more eagerly.

It is vital to identify the key problem in this mess of hypotheticals which aren't merely hypothetical. For instance, there is nothing wrong with boycotts in and of themselves. But given that there is a reason to hold free speech sacred, that it provides something of value to society, there is surely something wrong when businesses and individuals alike cease to speak what they perceive as true and rather parrot those ideas that gain them approval.

The problem with censorship - regardless of whether the government gets involved - is that it corrupts the marketplace of ideas. Most distinctively, it strips people of their intellectual autonomy. It is true that nobody has any obligation to agree with others' views - or for that matter, even to listen to them. This is not a free speech issue. But in a society supposed to be tolerant of ideas, every man must be free to listen to an argument if he so chooses, without third parties actively getting it the way to shield him from offensive or dangerous thoughts.

In an ideal society, the response to bad ideas is counter argument. The reason for this is very simple - common sense and the crudest familiarity with history informs us that we can't reliably tell the difference between good and bad ideas. Censorship, by definition, means that somewhere there must be an arbiter or tribunal of truth that we trust to filter out harmful ideas such that the plebeians never have to think about them. Functionally, these people will be outsourcing their good judgement to some supposed experts, whose activities they must remain too ignorant of to scrutinize.

Censorship can only ever be a force of good when all of the following conditions are met:

• The censors act in the public's best interests without abusing their power
• The commoner is more easily seduced by bad ideas than the censors
• The censors' better judgment cannot be conveyed in the form of counter argument

Perverted discourse

While government censorship is the most egregious kind, softer limitations on free speech cause much the same harm. The problem is that truth is such a minor concern for most people that innumerable practical matters trump it. When truth is pitted against the law, violence, threats, economical sanctions or social repercussions, only a precious few idealists are willing to defend it.

This is why we should resist the temptation to escalate disagreement beyond facts and argument. Not only does the dispute disconnect from truth and orient towards more tangible forms of power - simultaneously, people cease to represent themselves truthfully and instead choose to play talking point bingo, because in such a society jobs and connections will depend on your reputation, and those are more pressing demands than a good conscience.

If honesty is lost in the process, it doesn't make much difference whether people are toeing the party line in DDR or doing political correctness yoga in the present day western world. The only solution is a de-escalation of public discourse.