Review: Freedom From Speech

by Andrew Evans

August 31, 2014

Two and a half millennia ago, Aristotle made one of the most fundamental statements ever about human society: “Man is by nature a political animal.”
Aristotle meant more than that people group together for their survival and reproduction. People actually group together to strive for higher goods beyond mere preservation. This is politics—a community’s pursuit of a good life together.

And it is our speech that makes us political, Aristotle teaches. Through speech we communicate our needs, but we also argue about the deeper things—what is right and wrong, “the just and the unjust,” as Aristotle puts it. Politics is about governing society justly, and it is our speech, our rational discourse, that makes politics possible.

A brief new book by Greg Lukianoff, Freedom from Speech, sheds valuable light on what Aristotle sees as the foundation of our political nature. Lukianoff examines the state of free speech in our culture. He examines not the First Amendment, although as the head of the free-speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, he is certainly qualified to do so. Rather, Lukianoff examines “Free speech as a cultural value.”

And free speech is in decline. Freedom from Speech concisely lays out the ways that speech is being limited in America. Lukianoff begins by listing a number of high profile cases where figures had their reputations tarnished and even their livelihoods threatened because of things they said, sometimes in private. He then goes on to discuss a couple of noteworthy trends in academia where speech is being curtailed.

His book focuses on academia because universities are one of the most obvious places where speech is being limited. Both “trigger warnings” and commencement-speaker “dis-invitations” have made headlines in recent months. Lukianoff excoriates both of these trends with precision. They are attempts to limit what students hear, and thus what people say. By discussing the academy at some length, Lukianoff builds on his previous book from 2012, Unlearning Liberty, which examined the decline of free speech in universities.

But Lukianoff also notes that the university cannot be the sole source of curbs on free speech. “I continue to believe that the increased national focus on punishing offensive speech stems, in large part, from the ‘bleeding out’ of the bad intellectual habits of American higher education,” Lukianoff writes. “However, I do not think—nor have I ever thought—that blame for the erosion of support for the cultural value of freedom of speech can be laid entirely on the ivory tower.” The erosion of free speech in other Western countries, such as Britain, or countries with democratic values, such as India, demonstrates that the problem is deeper and more pervasive than the silly movements in universities.

Lukianoff sees a deeper and more disturbing problem in Western society. The modern age has led to the creation of tremendous wealth, and with it, tremendous comfort. But such comfort gives rise to complacency:

“A society in which people can avoid physical pain comparatively easily will produce people who are less prepared to deal with it.”

The same principle applies to mental comfort. “The same instinct is driving our rising desire for intellectual comfort, by which I mean a yearning to live in a relatively harmonious environment that does not present thorny intellectual challenges, and in which disagreement is downplayed or avoided altogether,” Lukianoff says.

And the result of this overwhelming drive for comfort is devastating for speech: “Eventually, they stop demanding freedom of speech and start demanding freedom from speech.”

Through much of his book, Lukianoff strives not to blame either the right or the left in contemporary politics for the decline in free speech. Freedom of speech is a deep issue that goes beyond any one party in a society like ours founded on the primacy of liberty. But he notes that the political left does have a basic tendency to assault speech.

Liberals, in general, are motivated fundamentally by empathy. While conservatives take their moral norms from a variety of places, such as traditional values and religion, “progressive morality is largely one-dimensional, driven primarily by the care ethic,” Lukianoff says. And because liberals just want people be happy and comfortable, he argues, they attack speech they deem offensive or threatening to others.

Lukianoff’s description of liberal morality provides a useful paradigm for understanding assaults on freedom of speech, especially in liberal epicenters like most universities. It does not always hold up—progressives champion graphic and explicit art, for example, that make people uncomfortable—but the morality of empathy helps explain a lot.

But this explanation, while sympathetic and surely often correct, misses a much darker aspect of the left’s social agenda.

The left feels empathy for people, but that empathy is not guided by any sense of what is right and good for people. Like Bill Clinton, the empathic left merely “feels their pain” and wants to end it. But this myopic focus on perceived harm validates all harm, labeling harms as threats to individual lives. Every pain inhibits an individual from living the life he wants to live, and so the left’s efforts to stop all pain ultimately means that it ends up supporting all choices, regardless of whether a choice is right or good for the individual or society at large. This “ethic of validation,” which often looks like the ethic of care, is the progressive vision for society.

Welfare work requirements are a good example of this ethic of validation. Before 1996, welfare recipients had to meet few, if any, requirements in order to receive aid from the government. Welfare simply alleviated physical suffering without regard to the actions the individual was taking—such as whether the individual was working. This approach to welfare is unmoored empathy at work in social policy.

Conservatives argued that work was fundamentally good for people, and as a result in 1996 the Republican Congress pushed through work requirements for welfare, tying government aid to either work or the pursuit of work. If able-bodied individuals did not pursue work, they did not receive help—even if they were suffering. The government still provided help, but the help did not simply support individuals’ choices of how they would live their lives. Welfare work requirements are shaped by a broader vision of what is fundamentally good for human life.

The progressive attempt to validate all lifestyle choices belies at best agnosticism, and at worst nihilism, toward the existence of an essential good for human life. In more Aristotelian terms, progressives deny that there is any end to human life—a goal or reason for living that should guide choices that individuals make.

Limits on speech result from this agnosticism, because speech can be very painful when it contradicts choices and exposes their insufficiency. But limiting speech makes politics much more difficult, if not impossible. 

If we cannot speak to each other about what is most important in life for fear of offending others and failing to validate their choices, we lose the ability to be political. We become detached individuals rather than a political community.

Freedom from Speech shows how speech is being curtailed and hollowed out in our society. By losing the freedom to reason with each other over difficult issues, we are becoming, in fact, less than human.

Instead of Being Disgusted by Poverty, We are Disgusted by Poor People Themselves

Thursday, February 16, 2012 by the Guardian/UK
Empathy has crashed. No more cruel to be kind. We must simply be cruel.

by Suzanne Moore

She is there whenever I go the shops. Every time I think she can't get any more skeletal, she manages it. Wild eyes staring in different directions, she must have been pretty once. I try not to look, for she is often aggressive. Sometimes, though, she is in my face and asking me to go into the shop, from which she has been banned, to buy her something. A scratchcard. She feels lucky. "Maybe some food?" I suggest pointlessly, but food is not what she craves. Food is not crack. Or luck. She has already lost every lottery going.

An addict is the author of their own misfortune. Her poverty is self-inflicted. All these hopeless people: where do they all come from? It is, of course, possible never to really see them, as their distress is so distressing. Who needs it? Poverty, we are often told, is not "actual", because people have TVs. This gradual erosion of empathy is the triumph of an economic climate in which everyone, addicted or not, is personally responsible for their own lack of achievement. Poor people are not simply people like us, but with less money: they are an entirely different species. Their poverty is a personal failing. They have let themselves go. This now applies not just to individuals but to entire countries. Look at the Greeks! What were they thinking with their pensions and minimum wage? That they were like us? Out of the flames, they are now told to rise, phoenix–like, by a rich political elite. Perhaps they can grow money on trees?

Meanwhile, in the US, as this week's shocking Panorama showed, people are living in tents or underground in drains. These ugly people, with ulcers, hernias and bad teeth, are the flipside of the American dream.

Trees twist through abandoned civic buildings and factories, while the Republican candidates, an ID parade of Grecian 2000 suspects, bang on about tax cuts for the 1% who own a fifth of America's wealth. To see the Grapes of Wrath recast among post-apocalyptic cityscapes is scary. Huge cognitive dissonance is required to cheerlead for the rich while 47 million citizens live in conditions close to those in the developing world.

This contradiction is also one of the few things we in the UK are good at producing. I heard a radio interview recently with a depressed young man with three A-levels (yes, in properly Govian subjects) who had been unemployed for three years. The response of listeners was that he was lazy and should try harder. Samuel Beckett's "fail better" comes to mind. Understanding what three years of unemployment does to a young person does not produce a job, any more than the scratchcard will change a crackhead's life. But pure condemnation is divisive. This fear and loathing of those at the bottom is deeply disturbing.

Three years ago I was on a panel with Vince Cable at The Convention of Modern Liberty, when Cable was still reckoned a seer for predicting the recession. He said then that the financial crisis would mean civil liberties would be trampled on. But what stuck in my mind was a sentence he mumbled about the pre-conditions for fascism arising. Scaremongering? The emotional pre-condition is absolutely this punitive attitude to the weak and poor.

Our disgust at the poor is tempered only by our sentimentality about children. They are innocent. We feel charitable. Not enough, perhaps, as a Save the Children report tells us that one in four children in developing countries are too malnourished to grow properly. Still, malnourishment isn't starvation, just as anyone who has a mobile phone isn't properly hard-up. Difficult to stomach maybe, but isn't all this the fault of the countries they live in?

At what point, though, can we no longer avoid the poor, our own and the global poor? Or, indeed, avoid the concept that frightens the left as much as the right: redistribution, of wealth, resources, labor, working hours. Whither the left? Busy pretending that there is a way round this, a lot of the time.

The idea that ultimately the poor must help themselves as social mobility grinds to a halt is illogical; it is based on a faith for which there is scant evidence. Yet it is the one thing that has genuinely "trickled down" from the wealthy, so that many people without much themselves continue to despise those who are on a lower rung.

The answer to poverty, you see, lies with the poor themselves, be they drain-dwellers, Greeks, disabled people, or unemployed youth. We will give them bailouts, maybe charity, and lectures on becoming more entrepreneurial. The economy of empathy has crashed, and this putsch is insidious and individualized. No more cruel to be kind. We must be simply cruel.

The argument that there is enough to go round is now a fairytale, like winning the lottery. Poverty is not a sign of collective failure but individual immorality. The psychic coup of neo-liberal thinking is just this: instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves. This disgust is a growth industry. We lay this moral bankruptcy at the feet of the poor as we tell ourselves we are better than that.