I’ve long taken my self-identification as a left-libertarian to be a clear enough indication that free speech is important to me. More and more, I’ve come to question that. I’m now fairly convinced that there is no place on the left for free speech absolutism, so I feel it necessary to make my views clear on the matter.
There’s a famous preface (or rather, proposed preface), written by George Orwell, to his novel Animal Farm. The preface was a response to the difficulties he had getting the novel published in war-time Britain, owing to the unwillingness to publish any novel critical of the Soviet Union at that time.
Orwell is probably my single favorite all-around writer—he wasn’t the greatest novelist, essayist, or memoirist, but his writing has the wonderful quality of not having one ounce of presumption to greatness in it. Orwell did not write for ego, nor for posterity—what an irony his very topical critiques of authoritarian government have made him one of the most cited and widely read novelists from the 20th century. If you haven’t read him beyond 1984 and Animal Farm, you’re doing yourself a great disservice. I’ll lay my cards on the table: Shooting an Elephant might be the only piece of literature that’s ever made me cry.
As someone who has described myself as a leftist more or less my entire adult life, I feel very close to Orwell—when I speak admiringly of the idea of socialism, it’s really not Marx’s, Proudhon’s, or Saint-Simon’s socialism I’m thinking of. It’s the measured, sensible, humane socialism Orwell alludes to without ever really articulating, more of a pervasive feeling in his work that there is something deeply wrong that ought to be fixed than a fully-fleshed out political theory. It’s probably because he never really describes what he means that he can’t be repudiated in the way those other socialists can be, and that he was vocally embarrassed by the other socialists he had to share space with—but I’m fine with that. Ambiguity is as much a sign of healthy skepticism as of intellectual unscrupulousness.
I return to the proposed preface, entitled The Freedom of the Press, surprisingly often. Maybe it’s just because I like the straightforward tone with which Orwell always wrote, but also because the historical circumstances he describes feel so disconcertingly like our own:
The issue involved here is quite a simple one: Is every opinion, however unpopular — however foolish, even — entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say ‘Yes’. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, ‘How about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?’, and the answer more often than not will be ‘No’. In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organised societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg [sic] said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way. Both capitalist democracy and the western versions of Socialism have till recently taken that principle for granted. Our Government, as I have already pointed out, still makes some show of respecting it. The ordinary people in the street – partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them – still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.
What is perhaps not always true, but is in our time and was in Orwell’s, is that there seems to be a very substantial portion of the thinking class which harbors a barely-concealed contempt for the concept of free expression, and they are not of the religious conservative type, either—many would go so far as to describe themselves as revolutionaries.
One sign of this is that the position I’m going to argue in favor of in this piece is one which is called “free speech absolutism,” and I actually find myself embarrassed to identify with the term. Not because I don’t think we should, on balance, have extreme tolerance for free speech, but because if one searches the phrase, one turns up article after article about Elon Musk and how crazy he is with his dangerous and delusional “free speech absolutist” nonsense.
Now, I don’t like Elon Musk. I think he’s a lunatic, and I have a general prejudice towards the .0001% which I’m very comfortable not to transcend, thank you very much. He certainly has a certain something-something which anybody who has gotten to his position in life must have, but I don’t care about one’s charisma or drive to succeed, I simply care if you’re a good person. By most accounts, Musk is not. I don’t know the guy, but I know people like him, and I haven’t liked a single one of them. But how strange is it for American media organizations to demonize Elon Musk because of his support for free speech (something to which he can’t even be said to have a sincere commitment)? How did this guy become the face of free speech?
There would, in theory, be good arguments against a vaguely defined notion of “free speech absolutism”—censorship of the form of criminalizing the distribution of child pornography, for instance, is an obvious and uncontroversial good. It should be clear that this is not the sort of speech such absolutists are advocating for. When we discuss speech, we mean the conveyance of a set of ideas whether spoken, written, and expressed artistically and in public. This ought to apply only to speech between adults, because speech is a two-way affair—to convey an idea involves not merely the speaker, but the ability of the listener to digest that idea in a rational manner, a power which at least in theory is better attained by adults than children. This is partly a result of psychological development, but also education, and by definition, children lack both. It is undeniably the case that the kind of speech conveyed to minors can have a vastly more dramatic impact on their development for good or ill, an impact they have little meaningful ability to influence and moderate. A parent who habitually belittles, insults, and screams at a child, even if they never physically assault them, is nonetheless correctly deemed an abusive parent, and I don’t think the logic which makes such verbal abuse towards adults legal, if not moral, works when applied to children. Therefore I’m fairly agnostic about what ideas should and should not be conveyed to minors—the issue is deeply complicated. So I’m really uncertain what to think of the book bans that have taken place in right-leaning states in the US over the past several years—some, I’m sure, are ridiculous and reactionary, and others may have real merit behind them. It is certainly true that insofar as it isn’t harmful, kids should be exposed to a wide diversity of ideas and gain a familiarity with the different options open to them. But then, I doubt many of the people upset about the banning of Antiracist Baby, I Am Jazz or Heather Has Two Mommies would have a problem with banning the more racially insensitive works of Dr. Suess, and little was heard from the left when two New Jersey lawmakers attempted to institute a statewide ban on reading Huckleberry Finn in classrooms because of the book’s use of the N-word. So is it free speech the left is concerned about in this case, or is it simply their speech they’re concerned with protecting? And is there not real intellectual dishonesty in treating the banning of books from school libraries as a free speech issue, when we generally understand that the freedom of speech we apply to adults communicating with other adults is appropriately curtailed in many instances when an adult is communicating with a child?
Apart from general culture war silliness, little about the contours of the free speech debate has substantively changed. Those who advocate censorship from the left will tell us that to defend democracy and freedom of speech, it is necessary to prohibit certain kinds of speech which threaten civil society. Fascists, we are told, pose a unique threat because they will back up their anti-liberal rhetoric with violence. To allow their ideas to spread is to imperil free speech for everyone else, so they must be silenced. Depending on who you’re talking to this may be affected through social media blackouts, boycotts, extrajudicial violence, or through passing hate speech laws. We will be told that certain people have opinions which they ought to be afraid to express, and whatever harm may be done in inculcating that fear is nothing compared to the harm done by the actual expression of those ideas, that doing so in fact creates a freer society for those who, by virtue of their tolerant beliefs, actually deserve a free society. To use a specific example, take the self-described “historian and activist” Mark Bray, author of Antifa: the Anti-fascist Handbook, who advocates for “preemptive self-defense” against fascist organizing, since such organizing is bound to turn to violence as a matter of historical law. Or, in the words of George W. Bush “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” In fact, the concept of preemptive self-defense only really rose to prominence as a legal defense used by the Bush administration to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. One wonders if Bray is aware of where he copped the term from.
It is permissible, in such cases, to make it “physically costly” to be a fascist organizer. In fact, anything (Bray is happy to use the phrase “by any means necessary”) is acceptable, so long as it ensures that fascists never come back into power.
Those who oppose censorship will argue that to try to restrict only some speech is like trying to pop only some of a balloon. The right to free expression is, in fact, the core right which civil society depends upon for existence. The leftist who wishes to restrict the fascist’s right to speak, precisely because the fascist wishes to eliminate freedom of speech, has herself demonstrated a wish to eliminate freedom of speech-it is not free speech she desires, but only tolerable speech, and the bounds of that tolerance have a funny habit of narrowing more and more over time. The result, in civil society, is a war of all against all, where instead of trying to defeat one another’s ideas in a rational manner, we simply try to prevent one another from expressing those ideas through some degree of force—the question of whether the ideas hold water or not becomes, perversely, orthogonal to the issue. To maintain a civil society, a society in which democracy is even possible, requires that we be able to trust one another to at least let us say what we have to say, regardless of how others feel about it. It may be the case that fascists, in certain rare circumstances, pose an existential threat, but pre-emptive violence against them only serves to generate sympathy and popularity for them, and there is no clear evidence that such violence or other prohibitions on their free speech actually achieve the desired aim of preventing fascists from gaining power. On this view, advocates for violence like Bray are no better than the fascists themselves—like the fascists, he believes he is doing good, and like the fascists, he is in fact doing immense harm.
The reason these two views never seem to reconcile with one another, I believe, is that the people advocating for them are in fact operating from different sets of principles. Those in favor of censorship claim their goal is to maintain the integrity of civil society—but just what speech should be restricted in pursuing this goal? One cannot help but notice that fascists do not, in fact, ever talk about how important it is to abolish freedom of speech, if only for the simple reason that only leftists are lacking enough in self awareness to say, when asked how often they beat their wife, “as often as I can! And you?”
What “not tolerating the intolerant” means concretely is that fascists should be prevented from participating in civil society at all—any talking point which can be “reasonably” construed as fascistic ought to be silenced, lest it aid the growth of a fascist movement.
But what constitutes a fascistic viewpoint? If you disagree that the expression of fascist ideas poses a threat to civil society, and you say so publicly, are you not complicit in the fascist erosion of civil society? It seems to logically follow that, if we ought to eliminate free speech for fascists because fascists threaten civil society, then we need to restrict the free speech of anybody who threatens civil society. Isn’t the liberal who believes in universal free speech not the aider and abettor of the fascist? And is aiding and abetting of an ideological criminal not itself a crime? Is the free speech absolutist not inviting violence by allowing fascists to hold public platforms?
Those in favor of censorship may claim that this argument is not fair—they draw the line for their preemptive self-defense at actual fascists, and no one else. Surely, this is a slippery slope fallacy, and in reality we must place boundaries on speech to preserve free speech. This argument is mistaken, because it presupposes that those who wish to place limits on free speech sincerely hold free speech to be a good which ought to be defended.
But, in listening to those who have christened themselves the arbiters of what is and is not fascism, of what speech should and should not be tolerated, should those of us who are willing to defend free speech even for those who would take it away from us not recognize a Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads when we see one? When Jason Blakely argues that limits must be placed on freedom of speech, his argument depends on a theoretical world in which his Ministry of Truth is composed of Charles Taylor-inspired civic republicans. In what actually existing democracy could we now or ever count on such a rational and even-handed body of censors? This is what makes censorship such an inherently dangerous topic—what it will always boil down to is the ideology of the people doing the censoring, and it will always be in the interest of every partisan group to ensure that they have party men in those positions. When I talk to leftists today, to my great dismay, I do not get the sense that they in fact care about freedom of speech at all. I certainly get the sense that they tolerate certain speech, will politely entertain it in the same way Catholics politely entertain my discourses on the problem of evil and biblical inconsistencies—just long enough to gauge their chances of converting me, before eventually deciding I’m irredeemable. But to the extent they tolerate speech, they do so not for reasons of principle, but for reasons of strategy—in other words, for exactly the same reasons they accuse fascists of doing so.
This, in other words, is the difference of principles I’m talking about. There are some of us who believe freedom of speech is a good, desirable unto itself, and some of us who believe it is a tool—to be used when it comes in handy, and to be put away or disposed of when it’s inconvenient, the same way modern leftists often speak of nonviolent resistance, as if Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. were in fact Machiavellian rational calculators, who did not actually have philosophical and spiritual commitments which led them to believe that pacifism was not merely useful, but morally necessary. The man who wrote “Violence solves no social problems; it merely creates new and more complicated ones” is recast as a strategist who merely thought nonviolence was the appropriate tactic for his particular battle, who seeked to humiliate his enemy, not “to win his friendship and understanding,” and not who thought that this “can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives,” but simply by making a public performance of appearing to do so—after all, how could this be true, if fascists are not worth redeeming? Can we trust these leftists to make judgments on the basis of historical laws when they can’t even remember the 1960s? The truth is that violence is not just a tool—it is an evil. It may be a necessary evil in some circumstances, but it remains an evil nonetheless.
I have argued that human virtues can be derived from two sources—from what is good for the individual, and what is good for human societies. Virtue is the balance between the two—good people make good societies, and the mark of a good society is its ability to reproduce good people. Democracy is predicated on the belief that humans are social animals, and that we are best when (having been properly educated) we are free and able to freely engage in social life, which to a very large degree means the freedom to communicate openly and honestly. What freedom could be more intrinsic to a free society, particularly in its political dimension, than the ability to freely express oneself? It is not merely that free speech is good for people, or that it is good for society—it’s good for both, and is just as defensible on both grounds. The challenge for society is not to decide what people can and cannot say, but to decide how to go about creating people best equipped to delineate between what they should and shouldn’t say, and what of the things others are saying deserves their attention and serious consideration. That neither fascists nor contemporary leftists seem to want such an environment suggests quite a bit about their motives, and their confidence in their ability to defend them.
For many years, I have wanted to believe that free speech is, at heart, a left-wing value. It is certainly a value intrinsic to the vision of an open, participatory, democratic society, which I had thought the left stood for. I don’t believe it does anymore, and I’m skeptical that it ever could. There have doubtless been real libertarians on the left—John Stuart Mill, Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Rosa Luxemburg, and Orwell all distinguished themselves in this regard—but their influence is marginal, and has always been so. Obviously, I am not on the right—whose supposed advocacy for free speech is quite obviously of the “for me and not thee” variety, apart from many other fundamental disagreements. I am sympathetic to centrism in that I am happy to acknowledge the many benefits of liberal democratic states and free markets. Still, I am highly skeptical of these institutions—I do believe that we can do better than both state and capital, and that we ought to attempt to construct alternatives—so I am not a centrist, at least not in principle. This seems to leave me with only one option.
But can I really say I’m “on the left” anymore? I took a political compass test for this paragraph, and I am still a far left libertarian, by their lights. But good lord, I don’t feel like I’m on the left these days. Insofar as the left supports democracy, I am with it. But insofar as it opposes free speech, it opposes the core freedom which makes democracy possible. A democracy without freedom of speech is a legitimate tyranny of the majority. Since the left is a minority, and nonetheless wants to curb free speech, it seems the only logical end of their political project is a non-democratic one. The left, seemingly in every faction, no matter how nominally libertarian, agrees on little except their seemingly universal repudiation of free speech. If this is true—and I wait eagerly to be convinced that it is not—then I am not a leftist, and I do not consider communalism a left-wing project. The left has the internal contradiction, present from its most embyronic form, of seeking to create a free and participatory society, but attempting to do so through violent and authoritarian means.
In the face of this contradiction, the left has usually demurred, and has time and again betrayed its core values. In the 21st century, despite the early, libertarian promises of the Occupy Movement, it has decided to repeat history. It has favored slandering, bullying, and intimidating its opponents; it has prioritized ideological purity over diversity of thought, exiling or rewriting its own elders to excise wrongthink. It fears reasoned debate and thrives on censorship. More than anything else it has continued its longest-held tradition—pretending to represent a working class which it loves in abstract but despises in reality, advocating for a free society of people who do not and will never exist, and avoiding at all costs a free society of actual human beings, with all their flaws and indiscretions, all their “counterrevolutionary” tendencies.
Many of the best ideas we have come from the left. It would be nice if we could actually talk about them.
The issue is that fascism cannot be reasoned with as it is inherently illogical.
Intellectual inoculation must occur before the person is infected with the disease of fascism; if the person is already infected, they usually stay that way till they die, or they cure themselves (perhaps with some help) and thus produce a set of intellectual antibodies that theoretically will keep them away from such an ideology (and similar ideologies).
These antibodies are values. All ideologies claim to hold to principles, which, as I understand it, are universal, or at least should be. The difference is in values, which differ from circumstance to circumstance. These values are the pegs in the game of Plinko that is life, posts that we bounce off of to guide our behavior that should conform to these principles more often than not.
Thus, fascism that already exists can only be defeated with physical force, while the potential for fascism can only be precluded with the correct values instilled from an early age or by grouping together with like-minded people.
Definitely believe there is a space for "free sppech absolutism" in the left. Not everyone is going to change their ways of thinking about certain things. All we can as leftist is hone the ability to ruthlessly critique those ideas to where espousing them is swiftly met with robust demolishing of their validity. Like I said, not everyone is going to change, but everyone will die, and in their death we should hope to give rise to better ways of understanding about less favorable ideas.