Here’s a short Big Think talk by Steve Pinker, much demonized by the success-hating Pharyngula crowd as well as those who make their living by prognosticating the demise and degradation of humanity or our lack of social progress. Here Steve advances the well-known arguments for both free speech and academic freedom, which is simply free speech (as well as freedom of inquiry, the right to pursue what interests you) in a university setting. The arguments may not be new, but in this generation need to be repeated endlessly, for many young people and Leftists are beginning to mutter darkly that free speech is overrated.
And so Steve’s rationael for free speech is worth hearing again:
“We just don’t know any route to knowledge other than what Karl Popper called ‘conjecture and refutation’: throwing an idea out there and seeing if it withstands attempts to falsify it.”
This of course refers pretty explicitly to empirical assertions, i.e., science construed broadly, but can also apply to philosophical claims that are either self-contradictory or contain hidden and erroneous assumptions that can be dispelled (i.e., the Euthyphro argument for a god-given morality).
One cannot falsify ideas that cannot be tested by observation of experiment. These include moral claims, which I view as ultimately subjective. But if your moral (or social) claims depend on assertions of fact, or are claimed to have certain consequences, those claims are subject to empirical examination, testing and falsification.
But of course there are other reasons to encourage free speech besides the empirical clash of ideas being tested against reality: these other reasons include the exposure of peoples’ ideas as a way to judge a person’s mettle, to hear points of view that may change your mind even on subjects with no clearcut objective “truths” (e.g. the quality of a novel), and to help people understand each other’s points of view.
At 2:30 Pinker argues, correctly, why it’s especially important for universities to adopt free speech because they are “idea factories”, even if those ideas make you uncomfortable.
At the end, Steve describes those aspects of speech (libel, incitement to imminent violence, and so on) in which it’s necessary to circumscribe speech. Tomorrow I’ll analyze an article whose author argues that those limits should indeed be tightened more narrowly than how American courts have construed the First Amendment.
h/t: Michael
It is hard to imagine how people could disagree with Pinker on this. That said, I know one angle they will exploit. At the very end, Pinker talks about “very carefully justified exceptions” to free speech. They will undoubtedly suggest that these exceptions should be expanded to include their favorite beefs.
Of course, those exceptions should be allowed to be freely expressed and evaluated for merit. That’s free speech. 😎
I was actually just going to comment that while I support free speech, I very much understand the perspective of people who have grown weary of defending it, even to the point of questioning its relative worth in the grand scheme of things.
Pinker describes the best possible outcome regarding free speech – a tidy process wherein bad ideas are countered by good ones, and everybody wins. He does not go into scenarios where all the free speech in the world doesn’t keep people from being mightily convinced by terrible arguments once exposed to them, and so we end up with the re-introduction of preventable childhood diseases due to anti-vaxxers, for example. He doesn’t talk about the dynamics of Twitter mobs, where the loudest, most extreme voices are amplified by their sheer zealousness, and more fair minded people become too exhausted or too appalled to engage this mob mentality for long. He does not describe the charming cultist of various stripes, whose charm and subjective appeal far outweigh the objective empirical evidence in many people’s eyes.
Again, I think the long term benefits of free speech are great enough that they are worth fighting for. That said, I totally understand how a tired parent might really just want anti-vaxxers to be censored away, because you really don’t feel inspired about waiting decades for the free market of ideas to ultimately, eventually, some day prevail when it’s your kid who might get sick in the foreseeable future. I have empathy for those who have moments of wanting to throw their hands up at the tremendous patience and perseverance upholding free speech takes. (I should add, however, that I very much applaud Pinker’s example in being a genial and extremely patient example of practicing what he preaches. He does not seem shaken by even the most bad faith or ridiculous criticism and continues to discuss his arguments in a way that shows true faith in the process of free speech. I can’t say that I would be nearly as equanimous if it were me, but again, I applaud him for practicing what he preaches.)
I think maybe your worry about the anti-vaxxers is not as bad as you say. There is plenty of speech and documentation to prove this wrong. There are always going to be people who ignore facts and evidence, yet believe in conspiracy nonsense. Religion is filled with this kind of thing. But the large platforms on the internet are a big problem and it has yet to be dealt with. By size alone the power of these private firms is beyond comprehension and very little has been done to control or regulate it. This makes no sense at all and has caused great damage even beyond what we know. Under the idea of free speech the govt. is very slow to step in and regulate. The damage to our elections and democracy are already in danger.
Agreed, the internet monopolies are way too powerful. I was just today writing about my Twitter account being locked for an utterly innocuous tweet.
I’m not sure what you mean by “as bad as you say” (in terms of how bad, precisely, that is,) but I would say the effects of anti-vaxxers have certainly been both significant and negative. The rate of unvaccinated children, while still small, has quadrupled over the past couple of decades, and I believe it has increased more than that in some specific areas. Something like 5.2% of kindergarteners in California aren’t vaccinated.
Either way, your example of the internet is another good example of how I think this generation has started to feel burned by free speech. Again, I want to emphasize that I do support freedom of speech – but I empathize with those who have seen real world negative consequences around this topic in the past decade or so and are feeling a bit burned out on the topic. Most things worth having require some difficulty and hard work, of course, but I get that this side of things is, well, difficult.
The anti-vaxxers are a big enough problem and they put out their propaganda for sure as well as damage to people’s health. However, the only way to finish them off is to expose them for what they are. That takes lots more of speech and writing and attack by science and doctors. I don’t think you can declare them illegal or breaking the law by throwing out their crazy beliefs any more than you might want to do the same to the NRA and gun nuts.
I don’t think you can declare them illegal or breaking the law by throwing out their crazy beliefs any more than you might want to do the same to the NRA and gun nuts.
Of course not, as I said, I support free speech – my point was just that I empathize with people grappling with the reality that, in a free market, sometimes the ‘bad guys’ are going to win, at least in places. It’s the best system we have but still an imperfect one.
We ALL grapple with that. Do you think that free speech advocates don’t wish that Trump trolls would just STFU? People need to learn that the bad guys do sometimes win without society caving into their desire to stifle speech they don’t agree with. They are free to complain about free speech. Would they rather not be?
@darwinwins – I mean, if you think it’s a trivial point, fair enough. Maybe I am naive enough to still be outgrowing some idealism and to find some things more central than others would. When I hear about anti-vaxxers going into immigrant communities and scaring them out of vaccinating, so that their kids end up with measles, for example – then to my mind it is worth taking a minute to tell people “Yeah, I get it, some things are really infuriating” when people start to question free speech. But I realize that to others, saying “Free speech is worthwhile, but difficult” might sound like a banality not even worth stating.
We have to begin by assuming we cannot be sure that we have certain truth. I am pretty sure the anti-vaxxers are wrong, but I do not know it to a certainty. Even I worry a bit about getting a pneumonia vaccine. You say you empathize about people grappling with reality. Are not the anti-vaxxers grappling? It is very unlikely, but suppose in the future we find out they are right. Should they have been silenced? Let them speak out and state their concerns, and require them to get their children vaccinated anyway until there is reason to believe their concern is warranted.
Speaking of vaccines, I just got three in the same day: pneumonia, shingles, and one other I can’t think of right now as I feel so lousy. What was I thinking to get three on the same day? I usually don’t have reactions to things like this but I feel like I have a mild case of flu. Doing some reading on it, which I should have done BEFORE getting the shots, I believe it is the shingles vaccine that is mostly to blame. Ok, I’ll stop my whining now.
@ Paul, if you had chickenpox as a child, your shingles vaccine is useless. You have your antibodies, and you have the Varicella virus lurking in some ganglion.
That’s not how I understand it. Shingles is what one gets later in life AFTER having chickenpox as a kid. As WebMD says:
“Chickenpox Reactivated: Research begun in the 1950s has shown that when we recover from childhood chickenpox infections, the virus that causes the infection, varicella zoster virus, remains latent in nerve cells. What causes reactivation of the virus is unclear, but as we age, experts believe the immune responses that keep varicella zoster virus dormant in the nerves weaken with age. One in three people will get shingles during their lifetime, and at least half of all people 85 and older have had the ailment.”
My father got shingles later in life and I had chickenpox as a child, so I felt it was important to get immunized.
We have to begin by assuming we cannot be sure that we have certain truth. I am pretty sure the anti-vaxxers are wrong, but I do not know it to a certainty. Even I worry a bit about getting a pneumonia vaccine. You say you empathize about people grappling with reality. Are not the anti-vaxxers grappling? It is very unlikely, but suppose in the future we find out they are right. Should they have been silenced? Let them speak out and state their concerns, and require them to get their children vaccinated anyway until there is reason to believe their concern is warranted
I don’t think one has to resort to moral nihilism (what other people would call moral relativism, but that’s a term I think is misused,) in order to support free speech. Free speech is not, to my mind, justified because everyone out there may well have a valid point – we can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that some people don’t. It’s justified because the goods of free speech, on the whole, outweigh the harms. I’m not going to pretend that behavior like this is ok in support of free speech however – instead, I will say behavior like that is a societal ill, but that free speech is, again, a difficult and not an easy project, that one has to be prepared to address the ills in order to reap the benefits.
If good ideas cannot prevail over bad in the marketplace of ideas, democratic governance is doomed. Bad ideas cannot be suppressed indefinitely; their real danger is that, once unleashed, they will prevail because their opposition has been censored.
That’s the course totalitarianism has taken throughout human history.
I would say that they usually prevail, on average, over long periods of time (our young democracy still involved horrible ideas such as slavery and burning witches, after all.) I say this not to be a pessimist, but to remind myself that a dose of realism is necessary when considering the benefits of free speech. If one walks in waiting to see good ideas simply triumph over bad ones, consistently, right away, and in real time, one will likely become disillusioned.
And if we decide that some ideas are too dangerous to allow into the open marketplace (that the common folk might be “mightily convinced by terrible arguments,” as you put it) who makes the decision regarding which ideas and arguments should be suppressed — quis custodiet ipsos custodes, as asked the Roman poet Juvenal?
Slavery wasn’t begun by a surfeit of free speech. But what set it on the path to its demise was the free speech of abolitionists.
Very well said Ken
I didn’t propose not allowing ideas into the open marketplace (although I think that very much happens in many cases – free speech or no, people censor each other via politeness norms, morals, and convention all the time, and to some extent society probably requires that. A person would, thankfully, be instantly shunned if they brought up slavery in 2019, for example, and I think that’s a good thing – we don’t need to keep debating that one forever, at some point it’s better that it’s just a complete and total moral taboo and we’re done talking about a horrible idea.) I just said I empathize with people who are sick of being surrounded by vile and sometimes harmful rhetoric. (And I’m sure I have terrible ideas of my own, ha ha, but that doesn’t make other people’s any less annoying. It’s kind of like how having one’s own bad driving habits doesn’t make others any less annoying.)
Good ideas not only be must expressed, they must be advanced and promoted with vigor. That is our job as citizens. We cannot simply sit back and expect the virtues of the ideas alone to carry the day.
As long as I get to decide which speech should be free, I have no problem with what you suggest. 😉
Sorry to be a broken record, but I don’t think I suggested any changes regarding free speech. What I said was I feel empathy for people in the current zeitgeist who feel burned by it. An analogy might be if someone said they sympathize with how young men living a life devoid of opportunity turn to opioids – that is in no way a promotion of abusing heroin, it is trying to understand how people get into a certain mindset.
I use this line now too, especially as I *am* a cis-hetero-middle class-white-male. (I am, however, nonreligious, socially awkward and originally a member of a linguistic minority.)
Showing you share the concern even if the details are different I think is iimportant.
” … for many young people and Leftists are beginning to mutter darkly that free speech is overrated.”
Or indeed to proclaim it loudly!
To quote a member of the ‘Woke’ from 2012:
“Free speech is the right to educated speech. If you utilize your right to ‘freedom of speech’ but then are socially or politically apathetic, you don’t vote, educate yourself on social issues, if you are not involved in the community, if you are not involved in being a citizen, an educated citizen, you have no right to free speech.”
E.g. Agree with me or be censored.
Who the heck said something so stupid?
I mean, if you believe in totalitarianism by a leader/administration that agrees with you, just come out and say it. Don’t say you believe in free speech and then say “but only if it meets all of this criteria that will result in it agreeing with me.”
There’s a (as usual) more plausible milder version of some of the same ideas: if there is a right to free speech, there is a duty to attempt informed speech. (Nothing follows from this, except the right to correct the uninformed, etc.)
Very good points on why freedom of speech is essential in modern society and that any restriction creates great harm. Just look at the current destruction within our own democracy with restricted speech very much a part of this trend. We have heard nothing but crickets from an entire party in Washington politics for 3 years. It is all wrapped up in fear and this is the most successful in restricting speech. It is how dictators are born with just the simple fear of talking or saying what you think.
This may be perceived as being far off topic but I’d like to suggest that you watch “The Great Hack” on Netflix about Cambridge Analytica (and, peripherally, Facebook). The Wikipedia article on Cambridge Analytica also is of interest. No wonder or glorious leader
keeps bloviating about “fake news”.
If you approach the question of speech from the standpoint of national survival, it is pretty clear that most of your totalitarian regimes do a pretty good job of killing off or running off their best scientists, and putting political hacks in their place, leading to technological stagnation and backwardness, followed by military inferiority.
The fact that the Soviet Union could not compete with the United States technologically because it was such a closed society led Gorbachev to institute perestroika to attempt to open up Soviet life in order to allow conditions to make the Soviets a technological competitor with the West. Since military capacity tracks technological innovation, there is a strong geopolitical interest in the question of the freedom to express ideas.
Of course, perestroika failed, because the Soviet Union was always an imperialist power, and it couldn’t contain all the ethnonationalist currents freed due to openness, compounded by historical legacy of having to confront the atrocities of Stalin’s campaigns of mass murder (committed only out of his pure intentions to achieve equality and justice, of course).
You also had a relaxation of repression under Deng in China, despite Tiananmen Square, probably based on similar concerns. As Xi tightens the screws, it is going to be interesting if China will be able to sustain its burgeoning scientific establishment, or whether it will go full Lyshenkoist given the opportunity.
Repression of speech that goes beyond the symbolic, and enforcing political orthodoxies inevitably manifests as repression of talented scientists, which ultimately is in the long-term suicidal to any enduring group which seeks to survive in a hostile and dangerous world. [Despite political salesmanship, liberal democracy has historically been a militarily aggressive, dangerous and potent force for war and conquest, and free speech has had an important role in why we speak English and not German or Russian.]
Another way of looking at it is that free speech is probably bad if you want to endure as a church, and probably good if you want to endure as a state.
If you look behind most of the would-be censors, there is usually some pie-in-the-sky political utopianism combined with millennialism, which believes if you could just brain-wash all the “ignorant people” to puke back your political orthodoxy on command, the Kingdom of God will arrive.
Myers is trying to smear Pinker as a rapist and is beyond contempt.
Meanwhile in the woke NYT: Free Speech is Killing Us
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/opinion/sunday/free-speech-social-media-violence.html
PZ Crybaby Myers is one of the most sad, pathetic people on the internet. Imagine if he was alt-right and he said the things he says, and made up the lies he makes up, and insinuated the things he insinuates, about woke darlings? There would be exposés in publications everywhere from Buzzfeed to the NYT, not to mention from “influencers” all over social media, and they would never stop. “The Internet’s Most Hateful Troll,” “The Man Who Wants to Destroy Progressives with Lies,” etc. But he does what he does to the enemies of the woke, so it’s all OK.
So, PZ Myers is now wishing Steven Pinker was dead…and he and his “horde” still believe *they* are the ‘good guys’.
They are truly repugnant people.
PX and his flunkies are exactly the kind of people who could get swept up in literally any movement, and it just happened to be this one. They’re so resentful and angry that they have no minds of their own. They’d be full-blown Nazis in 1939 Germany, saluting and going to rallies.
Free speech needs some limits, even the most ardent defenders agree to that. Threat of imminent violence, plain libel, (systematic de-humanising of certain groups ?), etc..
Of course the problem is in what constitutes libel and what is imminent violence. Who is going to judge?
Did the 24/7 hate-spewing of ‘Radio Mille Collines’ constitute an ‘imminent’ threat of violence? Not very clearly as such, but the resulting facts tell the story.
I’m differing here with our host.
I think that those bearded, excited men brandishing placards with “Death to those who mock Islam” is an imminent threat. They should be arrested and jailed/deported.
Perhaps they’ve lived too long under a safe bubble. Perhaps if they’re facing ever-tightening restrictions on speech as we do in Hong Kong, they may grow to appreciate it.
-Ryan