In the last few days, two respected media outlets have published opinion pieces extolling nearly unlimited freedom of speech—including speech that denigrates or satirizes religion.
The first is by Steve Pinker in today’s Boston Globe, “Why free speech is fundamental.” It’s worth a read since Pinker, as always, clarifies controversial issues with style, panache, and thoughtfulness. He gives three reasons why free speech is indeed fundamental, and you’ll have to read the editorial (free online) to see them. I’ll just give his Reason #1, and add a few short excerpts:
The first reason is that the very thing we’re doing when we ask whether free speech is fundamental — exchanging and evaluating ideas — presupposes that we have the right to exchange and evaluate ideas. In talking about free speech (or anything else) we’re talking. We’re not settling our disagreement by arm-wrestling or a beauty contest or a pistol duel. Unless you’re willing to discredit yourself by declaring, in the words of Nat Hentoff, “free speech for me but not for thee,” then as soon as you show up to a debate to argue against free speech, you’ve lost it.
He then levels his aim at the intellectual vacuity of “other ways of knowing,” implying something dear to my heart: the incompatibility of faith and reason (or, if you will, science and religion):
Perhaps the greatest discovery in human history — one that is prior to every other discovery — is that our traditional sources of belief are in fact generators of error and should be dismissed as grounds for knowledge. These include faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, augury, prophesy, intuition, clairvoyance, conventional wisdom, and subjective certainty.
How, then, can we know? Other than by proving mathematical theorems, which are not about the material world, the answer is the process that the philosopher Karl Popper called conjecture and refutation. We come up with ideas about the nature of reality, and test them against that reality, allowing the world to falsify the mistaken ones. The “conjecture” part of this formula, of course, depends upon the exercise of free speech. We offer these conjectures without any prior assurance they are correct. It is only by bruiting ideas and seeing which ones withstand attempts to refute them that we acquire knowledge.
This, in a nutshell, is the thesis of The Albatross; and I wonder how the good citizens of Boston will regard the paragraph about “traditional sources of belief, given that the primary one is religion?
Finally, accommodationists won’t take kindly to Pinker’s claim about the history of arguments about the geocentric Solar System:
Once this realization sank in during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the traditional understanding of the world was upended. Everyone knows that the discovery that the Earth revolves around the sun rather than vice-versa had to overcome fierce resistance from ecclesiastical authority.
Well, not everyone knows that. Ask Ronald Numbers, Michael Ruse, or the many accommodationists who people the National Center for Science Education. To these people, who are deeply wedded to the idea that science and religion are compatible, the notion that Galileo and Copernicus’s views were anathema to the Church on religious grounds is wrong. It was, instead, culture, personal animosity, of even a clash of science versus science! I see such a stand, refusing to indict religious dogma, as intellectually dishonest: one taken to further a political tactic of not alienating the faithful. But that’s my hobbyhorse, not Pinker’s.
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The other opinion piece about free speech is in The Economist: “Freedom of Speech: First—and last—do no harm.” (As is the magazine’s custom, the author isn’t identified.) I don’t know the politics of this magazine, but their stand on free speech—with a few exceptions like child pornography and speech inciting violence—is uncompromising. And they specifically mention religion. Some excerpts:
The Economist believes the right to free speech should be almost absolute.
Begin with the obvious controversy: blasphemy. The pope last week sympathised with those who feel compelled to react to perceived slights against Islam. Disparage another’s faith, he said, and you “can expect to get punched”. Not only were his comments a little unChristian, they were also deeply mistaken. Few subjects demand scrutiny as urgently as does religion—which, erroneously or otherwise, is invoked in conflicts and disputes around the globe. Muslims themselves forcefully, sometimes lethally, debate interpretations of their creed. Any censorship regime that exempts Islam or other religions from searching commentary is perverse.
Those are strong words! The piece even opposes the many European and Canadian laws against so-called hate speech, a stand with which I agree completely:
It is, for example, understandable that denying the Holocaust is an offence in several European countries, but it is also anachronistic: the evidence requires no help from the law to overwhelm the deniers. Geert Wilders, a disreputable far-right politician, should not face prosecution, as he now does, for pledging to reduce the number of Moroccans in the Netherlands. Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, a comedian, should not have been arrested for flippantly associating himself with one of the Paris killers. Likewise, Islamist zealots are entitled to exploit the West’s freedoms to decry its decadence. Free societies are strong enough to absorb and discredit these idiocies.
They wind up calling for less willingness of journalists to capitulate to religious cries of “I’m offended!”, as in the case of Muslims rioting over the Charlie Hebdo and Jyllands-Posten cartoons. That cowardly capitulation, seen in (among others) the BBC, the Guardian, and Yale University Press, leads, says the article, to a “spiral of censorship”:
Take into account every fragile sensibility or unintended consequence on the other side of the world, and public discourse will shrink to vanishing.
And that is Pinker’s First Reason. You college students who decry “hate speech” or “offensive speech,” as has happened on my own campus, pay attention!
h/t: Marco
