The Problem with the Free Speech Debate

Why we shouldn’t be having it and what it tells us

Warming up to Censorship

As we learn more about the organized efforts to suppress counter-narratives during the COVID pandemic, we are becoming increasingly divided on the issue of free speech and its role in society. Some say censorship was a good thing, having been awakened to the fresh dangers of loose words left unchecked.

Brutal lockdowns and images of packed ICUs motivated many of us to rethink the impact of our speech. When the wrong tweet could inspire someone to ignore lockdown, go unmasked, or postpone vaccination, it seemed the lesser evil to prevent that speech before it could do real harm.

This was the new wisdom born from pandemic, and it became broadly characterized as righteous, moral, pragmatic, even intellectual — as if rolling back decades of enshrined liberal values represented some great, philosophical ah-ha moment.

It also seemed curiously right for the times, since curtailing speech showed promise not only for public health emergencies but social issues as well. If the visceral threat of losing loved ones to a virus was the shock we needed to demand the censorship of harmful ideas, then it was a mountain of existing social justice crises that made us glad that censorship might stay.

In the years leading up to COVID, social media amplified regressive views on gender identity, feminism, sexuality, and race, inspiring fears of rising hate crime. Shielded by the protection of speech, too many backwards, bigoted comments thrived and festered to create the environment that emboldened violent action.

We are often reminded that you can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre, knowingly incite a stampede, and get away with it. Similarly, then, a lot more speech should be off-limits because of the obvious effect of its fallout.

But while this might appeal to our good nature — the promise to expunge all harmful words from public discourse — it doesn’t pass a broader risk assessment. In fact, I would go further to say that the ubiquity of these calls to rethink free speech indicates something not nearly as well-intentioned as it would seem.

The Means is the End

First, we ought to consider the implications of an environment in which all speech is evaluated on its potential to cause harm. Imagine gaming out how everything could ricochet and percolate through millions of minds, how it might inspire bad action, and then scoring that speech on safety. Then ask: how much of a safety threat would be the threshold to disqualify speech? What kind of threat would count, and against whom? How distant could the threat be from the words used?

Consider the power that would be given to whomever — or whatever — gets the privilege of adjudicating a word’s ability to harm. We have already seen how language has the propensity to shift from the foundation of its meaning, and how creative minds trained to seek offense in the every day can turn even once innocuous phrases into perfect boogeymen.

So-called “dog whistles” turn normal political speech into coded hate speech, and legimate criticisms of contentious things like drag queen storytime into veritable calls to arms. With enough cleverness and enough control over the conversation, anything can be made sour, even scapegoated for the latest crisis.

Now, if we mask the two sides of the censorship debate — left and right — so that we might be blind to whichever stands to benefit, we can assess the proposition without emotion. What it truly presents is a mechanism for dictating meaning, demonizing intent, and ultimately decimating opposition for whatever political power wields it.

To the naive, it’s a means to an end — with the end being social justice and public safety — but to the leery, the means is the end, in and of itself.

Molding the Masses

Seizing control of speech is a prize that makes any pretext suitable, and it has long been the prerequisite for tyranny, which cannot function without a public in lockstep. Preventing or stigmatizing nonconforming and unpopular opinions is how every oppressive regime has managed to gain control of its people, not to mention by making truly despicable ideas seem normal. Every duped citizen has always thought they were on the right side and only needed a brave voice to wake them up with a message that would’ve been unpopular for its time.

That’s why it has been old and settled wisdom that even unsavory speech should be protected, precisely because the passions of the people can too easily be swayed to find unsavory what they might desperately need to hear and commonplace what should be reprehensible. Therefore ugly speech — as long as it is not a direct, denotative call to violence — must be protected because it holds the space for brave and true words if there is ever a time of inversion and deceipt.

And the fact that our free speech debate today has been egged on (if not started) by an echo-chamber of leaders across the world is, to me, proof that we have entered such a time.

Tracing Shadows

In the United States, free speech is the first of 10 ammendments constituting the American Bill of Rights; in Canada it is listed first and deemed a fundamental freedom by our Charter Rights. There is longstanding knowledge that it is the most important of our liberties because it forms a bulwark against tyranny. So the true intent behind a campaign against free expression should be no mystery, and any attempt to sway the masses to foresake their most important freedom, even in part, should condemn itself.

And yet it hasn’t. Instead, brazen appeals by our leaders, pundits, commentators, journalists, and even recently-revealed quiet ones by our intelligence agencies, to “fix” the problem of free speech are met with silent nods from our fellow citizens. We respond to something we would have reviled ten years ago as if we have been traumatized to accept it.

Indeed, we have been molded to cower beneath the offense of unsavory language, even conditioned to call that speech violence. We have learned no accountability, finding it natural to blame another’s words for one’s actions. And we have been taught an arrogance of meaning so that we can receive a backwards reality as long as it is dictated the right way.

Thus we can begin to trace the outline of a peculiar and long-winded form of engineering that seems to have, by degrees of intensity, inched us into an adolescent petulance against the one freedom that ensures our liberty when it’s threatened by a lie.

Whether it be by the cruel and invisible hand of fate, an angry God devising a test, a fiddling devil, a shadowy cabal, or a rogue artificial intelligence, something appears bent to give us all the right tools and conditions so that we might dismantle a free society — all by our own doing.

If we can wake up to see the path laid out for us, we can avoid travelling it. Now is our chance to earn the freedom we inherited, and the lucky thing is that we have as little to do as to preserve our speech. The hard part, which cannot fully be appreciated without understanding the miasma of today’s thinking, is simply knowing what’s at stake if we lose it.

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