Today, similar acceptance seems evident in myriad age-restricted bans upon the usage of social media, even as weighed against its benefits… one Google search is allanyoneneeds to confirm the health concerns. And let’s set aside that any threat to the health of so-called “minors” might also mean a threat to the health of so-called “adults” – we’ve apparently reached a comfort level on that, too, one that leaves the adults free to decide for themselves whether or not to damage their health.
Illicit drugs, pornography, firearms – all restricted, if not illegal. Even movie theatres, video games, and music releases can have age restrictions or purchase & supervision requirements. As for me (though not sure for you), I’ve known plenty of minors in my lifetime who were turned down when they asked adults to forgive such bans and let them purchase [ restricted Product X ]. The point just now is not enforcement, which in real consequence is hit-or-miss, but more plainly actuality, which by point of fact is cultural evidence that we’ve found actual reason and method in our past for imposing restrictions and bans.
As for the current hoo-haw… if it suggests anything, could it be simply that plenty of people have raised considerable concern? On its face, the mere call to ban social media seems grave enough to warrant a far more judicious – and far less rapid – pursuit of any usage, widespread or minimal, while we try to understand the longer-term consequences of social media, not to mention A.I. As much as the pace of e-culture has reduced our tolerance for waiting, it has also accelerated ourlack of patience, which in turn has amplified our imprudence. Among these various cultural reductions, it’s that last one for me (though not sure for you) that really threatens our future.
Someone will argue that social media, and A.I. too, still have practical utility and that weighing this against any ban would short-change the deprived children and youth who use them. Yes, and a 12 year-old can’t just walk into the Motor Vehicles office and book a Road Test, yet driving too has great practical utility. Driving also presents a severe threat to public safety, even after motorists have earned their privilege by passing various licensing processes. Take issue as one may against protecting the duration or stringency of road safety and driver licensing, but for good reason, we do restrict its access.
So, as we halt a minor’s purchase of alcohol or tobacco, why not also a smart phone? Instead of banning social media or A.I., why not restrict the age for operating the devices and accounts we use to access them. How about restricting Rogers / Telus / Bell accounts to make it illegal for minors to be signed on as family members? As no responsible parent simply turns over their car keys to a 12 year-old, why hand them a restricted smart phone? That’s a cultural thing – a willingness to obey the law on account of respecting the belief that instituted it. Unless, of course, that’s a comfort level thing too, and people just aren’t comfortable with it – either way, wouldn’t that tell us something more about what we value most?
Funny over the past ~10-12 millenia how human civilization managed to grow without electronic anything – even longer than that, if we start redefining “human civilization.” Funnier still – and a little ironic – how all that non-digital time finally landed us here to be facing all this, just the same… did we follow some improper process along the way? Along that timeline, as social media and A.I. suddenly now present socio-economic threat, are we even capable of regulating or curtailing or halting their production and usage quickly enough? Are we even concerned enough to try? If no incentive to try outweighs the incentives to not try, at least not for the people who could try, then I’d say we definitely do and don’t know much about what we value most.
Do we value our health? As social media bears a documented health threat, why aren’t we flatly banning it all, for everyone? Or, if we won’t ban what’s addictive because its addictive, then at least we might regulate it because its addictive, and distorting, and hyper-personalized, and fatiguing, and algorithmic, and profitable. Regulate social media the way we regulate alcohol, or tax it the way we sin-tax alcohol and tobacco. Or at least license its proper usage… how ubiquitous would it be if access to social media were limited, even by dollar-cost? Wait, I forgot – it already is. So how important is any of this, as a health concern, when at least some people are evidently addicted? No problem – remember? Adults make their own decisions, plus bars and nightclubs seem to fare pretty well, and people still smoke too, if just a different shrub than before. Lucky for us, all that stuff is legal.
Bans and restrictions are no more effective in practice than their enforcement – in the world where I live, everyone who really wants to is able to smoke and drink and drive and shoot. But, as any of them might be held to account, well… that’s usually something after the fact, if even then. Lucky for us.
As for me though (not sure for you), rather than hassle everyone with bans and restrictions, rather than nag young people with “A.I. makes you lazy” or “Social media makes you ill,” I prefer to help them learn why “being lazy” or “being ill” is a worthwhile concern. I prefer to persuade people with more inclusive, longer-term responses, apart from whichever bans and restrictions might still get imposed. And I’d rather see us educating people about which choices we face, and which reasons underpin worthwhile debate, and which alternatives are available to those who want to live some better way than enduring threats to health and safety.
Create incentives that change behaviour – or hey, create disincentives that change behaviour, whichever – but create something more nuanced and imaginative than the decree of bans and restrictions, something more capable than getting peoples’ backs up. Unless, of course, we’re clearer now on what we value most.
I noted with interest this item from Financial Times Associate Editor Brooke Masters that features University of Chicago President, Robert Zimmer, specifically his adamant stance for university as a preserve of independent thought and inquiry.
Zimmer’s “warning,” to quote Brooke Masters, accompanies an announcement for committed undergrad funding, a pairing that may or may not suggest political scrim, depending on who thinks $200 million is a lot of money.
Full disclosure: I’ve always really admired The University of Chicago from afar for its eclecticism and quirky sense of self, like The Onion of the post-secondary realm but with degree-granting superpowers.
Disclosures continued, I also received recognition from the University of Chicago after being nominated for the Outstanding Educator Award by a student I taught who attended in 2010. The letter I received was not quirky so much as plain and congratulatory, but they did invite me for lunch sometime. Someday, Chicago, like maybe when my own doctoral epic is finally and fully told. Someday.
So very rarely am I into self-promotion, but all this seemed like a particular confluence and, anyway, who ever scrolls that far down on LinkedIn?
Of course, my immediate interest in the FT story is its connection to my own series on free speech from earlier this year – and, yes, more shameless vanity – but it felt reaffirming to see such noteworthy agreement from the likes of UChicago including, evidently, President Zimmer. I’ve never met Robert Zimmer, but if he’s ever here in town, sincerely, he’s absolutely more than welcome to join me for lunch.
About the Featured Image: Between the two figures is a tablet representing the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution, all shielded under the wings of Freedom, the Eagle.
Click here to read On Free Speech: IV. Grounding Movement Control
On Free Speech V. Bending Two Extremes
“I think what we’re learning is that, particularly when they get a choice, a lot of people decide to believe what’s more comfortable for them, even if it’s not the truth.”
First of all… throughout this series, I’ve left aside rioters, brutality, and wicked prejudice – these are implicated, and consequential, and obviously current – but they’re also particularly for another discussion. The corollary of free speech is what might be prohibited.
In this context, what is prohibited is the act of government censorship, with some qualification reserved for government to negotiate with the speaker, via judicial systems, on such bases as common obscenity, so-called “fighting words” of hatred, malicious defamation of public officials, and more generally the balance in likelihood between the “gravity of the ‘evil’” and whatever “invasion of free speech” might be deemed necessary, say if someone were inciting others toward government overthrow. By definition, free speech is the opposite of sedition. Here I discuss free speech.
In more recent times, when I’ve noted people invoking “free speech,” what I’ve tended to notice more plainly is their apparent desire for the power to control: in a battle draped by free speech, at stake seems not so much free speech per se as who gets to define illegal speech – illegal being relative to what the one ‘side’ believes ought to be legal – as though somebody’s right to speak is tangential to somebody else’s impetuosity to judge.
[NB: throughout, what I’ve been calling a ‘side’ can be populous or solitary. I’ve been presenting ‘side’ in single quotations because it’s also a word loaded with partisan and polar connotations, none of which I mean to suggest – not overtly, at least – besides which, I haven’t really decided on a more suitable word.]
The First Amendment prohibits government (including funded entities, such as public universities) from prohibiting speech on the basis of content. But as First Amendment rulings have contextually narrower scope, is it any wonder that this battle I describe might enjoin its participants? In the battle I describe, for gaining the control to define illegal speech, the fight is for the power to adjust the balance of favour toward what the one ‘side’ deems morally right and away from what another ‘side’ has said or might say that is morally wrong, none of which is quite free speech per se but more about a power of control. This is specifically why I consider the speaker in Part I and why it’s taken three posts further to reach this one.
The battle I detect seems unbecoming of the Supreme Court’s standard by which the principled right to speak ought to supersede the imposition of censorship. The Court favouring an individual’s right over a censor’s power is something akin to the glass half-full, or as Cose puts it of Justice Brandeis’s widely held presumption, “incredibly naïve.” Alternatively, the battle I detect ignores the glass completely – full or empty notwithstanding, weigh those rights and impositions any way you like. The battle I detect prizes something else entirely: predominance, as if the whole notion of freedoms or rights were contingent upon some grander notion that is earned before ever being learned, by which I mean might makes right. For a fact, I know this phrase makes some people squeamish, I gather in the name of all that is civilized – is it all the more surprising that any might see it lived out, seemingly in spite of themselves? As for me, I distinguish subtly but significantly between aspiration and sentimentality, between the world we try to create and the world we would prefer to see. The Land of Should is ideological, a fantasyland. Should we so choose, the only reality it will ever serve up is to host our last battlefield.
In the battle I detect, all of the above is the context in which free speech is brought to market. I don’t know about you, but to me, it’s as though all ‘sides’ have lost sight of what made them sides in the first place, or maybe just no one has ever understood. Are we obliged to lean one direction: to the individual, or to the censor? Does the citizen really leave off somewhere beyond where government begins, or are thems fightin’ words? The courts may offer “careful weighing of conflicting interests,” but nature eschews a vacuum – and lo & behold, there we are, doing our part, playing our role: just as government of, for, and by the people has no “right to control the moral content of a person’s thoughts,” even so We the People are there, on the streets, i.e. as private citizens, to battle it out. Democracy in action… QED?
As I said earlier, it’s been known to happen. I also said earlier that all this can be said of any given ‘side’ – yet, then again, can it? Surely “all this being said” includes me, here and now, writing this blog post… QED? Is there a context in which some ‘side’ might justifiably be censored, and silenced? I mean a context somewhere in between, say, protest and sedition, demonstration and insurrection, somewhere in between conscientious objectors and ignorant rioters, in between sincere agency and prevaricating lickspittle… and if we can so definitively know who’s who in the extremes I’ve just listed – and I’ll bet you have your favourites – then surely there’s a line censors may rightly or even righteously draw.
Of course, it depends on whom you ask, which is not irony but debate, which is not battle – if they meant the same thing, we’d use the same word. As for me, since you’ve read this far, I think we gather best as a collective group of individuals when we are a collective group of individuals – and if that seems obvious, still, we continue to battle as well as debate. And where we may debate over free speech, more precisely, it seems to me, we battle for free speech. We battle for control and make free speech the slogan. We uphold free speech as a virtue, yet it’s a child in a divorce, to whom the parents owe not just their primary respect and concern but their efforts and their behaviour and their decisions and real consequences. Not their irreconcilable differences.
Looking into the Court Chamber: visitor photography is prohibited once inside.
I suppose, if we are to battle (vs debate), we’d be wise to distinguish with the sharpest clarity a ‘combatant’ (from a ‘disputant’): after all, words matter.
Free speech is subject to prohibition of those abuses of expression which a civilized society may forbid. As in the case of every other provision of the Constitution that is not crystallized by the nature of its technical concepts, the fact that the First Amendment is not self-defining and self-enforcing neither impairs its usefulness nor compels its paralysis as a living instrument.
Or have I just seen too much within this of myself? Have I left off well past the point where others begin? Do I impose or intrude? Unlike me, Cose describes not specifically a battle but tension: “… we’ve always had this tension between the right to absolute speech and the right to speech that somebody or other considers dangerous or harmful.” Even so, I detect in his words what I’ve just distinguished, i.e. absolute combatants versus searching disputants. The Supreme Court, unlike Cose or me, discusses free speech more respectfully still, as neither battle nor tension, in a ruling that I think, to be fair, is more instructive than incredibly naïve:
“For social development of trial and error, the fullest possible opportunity for the free play of the human mind is an indispensable prerequisite. The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore, the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge. Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes.”
All that stone can get pretty slippery… better proceed with caution. And hey, remember, these guys only work within their reach. The supreme court in private life is nowhere near as costly: all those e-devices… rare earths, I guess? but saves a bundle on marble.
For my part, I’m no hero although – as with anyone who says this – context may decide otherwise. How about, I don’t want to be a hero. Whatever… if we live in a world where these words of Justice Frankfurter remain only words, what hero could save us anyway? Words matter. They’re as symbolic as every statue and every sculpture in which we’ve imbued our values and our histories, and history. You’ll note this is an observation about statues and sculptures, not a judgment about this statue or that sculpture. The reason I make this distinct is not to poke or agitate but, rather, to set up the following: a statue, a sculpture, a court ruling – any symbol – can manifest beyond elevated words. They can disseminate and dilute their way into biased hearts and minds if-and-when two things happen: (i) the speaker of those words understands who’s listening, and (ii) the audience of hearts-and-minds knows how to incorporate them. At that point, we may actually see them become lived-out realities, and now we might argue that the symbol matters. Even so, I will argue that the speakers and the listeners, the thinkers and the doers, matter even more.
Ideologies are the assumptive roots of our division, and what’s to stop any one from gaining acceptance – what, besides the overwhelming weight of conformity, anyway. The rule of law comes to mind, if might making right is not your thing. Symbols that represent values – yours, mine, anybody’s – may need explanatory context since they’ve arisen out of specific histories, but as censorship is an absolute, that sure rules out the audience. Does that make censorship destined only for battle, or can the outcomes of censorship be reached some other way? When disputants do become combatants, how is it determined that any were justified, not just petulant? Who even gets to say? Come now, don’t be naïve… as in any battle, to the winner go the spoils. Is that not frequently the motive to fight, or not always?
As for me, where I presently enjoy some measure of free speech, I seek no control over others, which maybe means I take no side in the battle… can that be possible? If yes, is it also palatable? I’m almost certain someone will feel such a stance shirks responsibility – and could I even be “almost certain” unless I felt a tad guilty about it, myself? So am I this mere spectator? I claim to be no hero; I’m also no soldier, so… a diplomat? I’m trying not to be a recluse, so… er, I’ve just laid out an argument of disinterest as amounting to uninterest?
I’ve been trying to comprehend and advocate for free speech insofar as its permissibility respects an audience to listen and think and decide on their own. In light of what I’ve been considering about speaker and audience, I’m almost prompted to recalling E. B. Hall’s overused summary of Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” (What Hall meant has been the subject of discussion, but the gist isn’t lost in translation.)
As the ABA sees it, “… confused origins aside, this poetic pledge provides no guidance about how to defend what some would call the indefensible.” Debate “no guidance” as you will, but note, in critiquing Hall, they also qualify what “some” would call the indefensible – okay, indefensible to some, and how about to anyone else… see you on the battlefield, then? With due respect to Hall and Voltaire: I think no one needs to die. As for the ABA, they further suggest, “in a system in which debate on public issues is supposed to be uninhibited, robust, and wide open, there must be protection for the freedom to offend.” Bring it on then. Battle royale, although I’m pretty sure no one ever accused the ABA of defending extremism – that seems the lot of the ACLU.
Where ‘extreme’ might describe some sole belief, yet a remark about ‘extremist-them’ can only arise from a smidgen of self-awareness, so of its usage we may ask: is it diagnostic or defensive, analytic or strategic, cognizant or subconscious? Not so much why say or why call someone “extreme” but, rather, by what measure? How distantly do they pick up from where it is you left off? Meanwhile, ‘polarised’ must only mean more than one belief. Regardless, either ‘extreme’ or ‘polarised’, we are left recently with zero doubt as to the hazards wrought by both.
Moreover, accurate or not, calling a belief “extreme” leaves open the caller as being perceived to be the ‘other’ side of polarisation, if only in the eyes of the called. How distantly do they plotyou, by their reckoning, as picking up from where they left off? As I put it in Part II: what might be the “immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment” of some other person’s perspective…
Furthermore, I now add, by whose judgment is “distortion” even understood? Who gets to say? Rather than wholeheartedly agreeing, from your current perspective, that the prescription to get up and move is great antidote for others, consider that it may just as well be directed at you as directed by you. Rightly or wrongly directed won’t even matter: there’s battle there to be engaged and, if chosen – by either side or both – then it’s best categorically and decisively won.
Unless… we can still choose civility: added patience to listen, greater tolerance to withstand, plainer wisdom to reflect – reflect upon others, yes, but reflect upon ourselves: reflect upon where we’ve left off, yet maybe, more importantly, upon where we might pick back up? That’s again back to Part II… getting up and moving, yourself; being humble, not humbled.
Humility, self-awareness, tolerance, respect – how about courage, and integrity, and doing what we say: concepts are words, and words must be lived if they’re to have meaning. A denotation is found in the dictionary, but connotation lives. Concepts must be lived, or how else do we disentangle all the strands in the web of freedom? Even more fundamentally: who is “we”? If I brought some nachos, could you bring some board games?
Free speech has to do with nuance and discernment, with speaker, and speech, and audience. Listeners as well as speakers must clear some space for each other, even when they disagree – in fact, probably then most of all. That’s my advice and my aspiration, and this blog and its posts their symbol, a call to action even as they’re part of my act.
I opened this short series on free speech by considering bias – not good, not bad, just something we have. And though I’ve undoubtedly left some tell-tale clues, if anyone reading these posts still can’t quite weigh my politics or decide which ‘side’ I fall… I’ve tried to write down the middle and not for an audience who pumps a fist in agreement, or in rage. I’ve sought to perplex and bemuse and disturb the shit, for all. In fluctuating ratio I’ve tried to summon and stir all three appeals, toward some desired effect: I’ve tried to write for an audience who will read and wonder, and reflect, and want to chat some more – nothing else seemed right than to leave some space for you.
I daresay this series on free speech has likely provoked some out there to characterise me. And thus, as writers are commonly taught, I come full circle to the comfort I find in the statement I featured by Ellis Cose.
The Rhetorical WHY 