John Durham Peters: Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition

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John Durham PetersCourting the AbyssFree
Speech and the Liberal Tradition

• A humble presentation by
• Brent Roberts, COMT530
• April 2007

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Free Speech and the Abyss

• What is free speech?
• What is the Abyss?
• How do these ideas come together?

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Public Communication

• In the heart of every democrat since beats the
  pulse of Athens envy, and a desire to put on a
  toga and speak swelling oratory. The early
  modern era adds a new item of apparel and medium
  of communication to the mix friends of democracy
  like to fancy themselves donning powdered wigs
  and taking quill in hand to compose declarations
  and encyclopedias that will set tyrants
  trembling.

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What is a liberal?

• insistence on religious and other forms of
  ideological diversity
• rejection of conscious design as the ultimate
  source of social order
• Respect for due process
• Respect for equal protection against the tyranny
  of the majority
• appreciation for eccentric behavior

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What is a liberal?

• Moderns/liberals
• Committed 100 to free speech

• Fundamentalists
• Low threshold for disgust
• Sickened and offended
• Sensitive to violence and insult

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Liberals

• Why do they do it?
• If it doesnt kill us, it makes us stronger
• Showing off
• Civic righteousness

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Liberals

• Liberal citizens are supposed to run the
  gauntlet of what disgusts them and to find a
  little poison gas in the air a good immunization
  against bigger woes. Citizens grow in wisdom by
  passing through folly, and dalliance with demons
  adds up to the greater education of all.

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Where is JDP on Free Speech?

• Defending the speech we hate does not mean we
  need to learn to love it or think it is really
  good stuff. Refusing to make laws prohibiting
  speech and expression does not mean that speech
  and expression are necessarily free of ill
  effects. One can oppose censorship while
  maintaining a capacity for judgments about the
  value and quality of cultural forms.

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The free speech story

• Heroes
• Big names Milton, Mill, Locke, Thomas Jefferson
• Today Journalists, Librarians and ACLU
• Librarians are perhaps the most passionate
  believers in the free speech story in the United
  States, with the ACLU.

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Marketplace of Ideas

• What is it?
• motor of democratic life
• nasty talk will call forth countervailing words
  of equal force and greater wisdom

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Marketplace of Ideas-Origins

• Milton, Areopagitica (1644)
• Let her Truth and Falsehood grapple who ever
  knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open
  encounter.

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JDP on the Marketplace

• worst of the intellectual frameworks commonly
  foisted on the essay
• That writing and reading should take place in an
  unrestricted, open-ended, and voluntary space,
  fair enough.
• BUT

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Homeopathic Machismo and Free Speech Theory

• Define homeopathy
• Define machismo
• Define homeopathic machismo
• The notion that a tincture of poison will lift
  us to heights of tolerance and civic-mindedness.

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Emergence of the marketplace of ideas

• 20th Century
• The real grip on the public and legal
  imagination is held by the idea that we are
  righteous in proportion to our refusal to judge.

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Libraries (again!)

• People whose livings and lives depend on the
  propagation of information and opinion in speech
  and text naturally believe theirs to be holy
  work.

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Oliver Wendell Holmes(1841-1935)

• Fought in the Civil War
• Supreme Judicial Court of MA
• Supreme Court justice, 1902-1932
• Great dissenter
• Abrams (1919) free trade in ideas

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Holmes

• most famous exponent of the idea that the first
  amendments purpose is to teach us to appreciate
  ideas that we hate
• consistent defense of the right of all parties
  to compete
• not free thought for those who agree with us,
  but freedom for the thought of those we hate

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Judges two bodies

• Personal opinions
• Judicial opinions

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Holmes

• He wanted a strong first amendment not because
  he thought more speech was the cure for bad
  speech, but because he wanted to leave the
  evolutionary battlegrounds unclutteredlike a
  Roman official making sure the gladiators all
  have water and bread before they head into
  combat.

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Louis Brandeis (1856-1941)

• Supreme Court 1916-1939
• Seen as radical
• Fought monopolies
• Fought to protect industrial laborers (especially
  women)
• Defended individual human rights
• Brandeis brief

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Brandeis

• Active discussion Sunlight is the best
  disinfectant
• Noxious doctrine
• If there be time to expose through discussion
  the falsehood and fallacies, to avert by the
  processes of education, the remedy to be applied
  is more speech, not enforced silence.

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Skokie Case

• The peculiar righteous indignation of insisting
  on the others right to free speech, even at the
  risk of ones own life, points to an emerging
  professional, self-sacrificial culture

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Landmark free speech cases

• Times v. Sullivan
• Cohen v. California
• Pacifica
• Hustler v. Falwell
• RAV v. St. Paul

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Critical Race Theory

• What is it?
• call for a tender recognition of particular
  cultural traits and pains
• Self-esteem and care
• absolutist first amendment response to hate
  speech has the effect of perpetuating racism
  (Mari Matsuda)
• rich and the educated consistently support free
  expression rights most vigorouslylibertarian
  faith is a philosophy of the privileged

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JDPs position

• We need not be moral and intellectual Gumbies
  while we wait for the returns to come in on the
  gore and vomit that some of our liberal
  colleagues want to suspend judgment on. Life is
  too short to think we can postpone some decisions
  forever. Impersonality is, as Paul knew, a good
  norm to live by, but it does not mean that we
  stop fighting for decency in the meanwhile.

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Watch, Therefore Suffering and the Informed
Citizen

• Milton and Mill
• Today

• Two questions
• What is our responsibility to distant and local
  suffering?
• When, if ever, is it just to shut our eyes to
  the misery of the world?

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3 ways to look at suffering

1. Catharsis
2. Compassion
3. Courage

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Responses to pain and suffering

• Psychological relief
• Intellectual illumination
• Aroused to sympathy, called to action
• Shut our eyes

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Samantha Power

• Distance is no excuse for ignorance
• Too much faith in human decency and due process
  keeps us unprepared to cope with the brutal
  realities of genocide
• People who could know, but do not bother, are
  implicated to some degree in the crime they could
  have helped prevent

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Pity

• Pity is the totalitarianism of the righteous
• Distance furnishes clarity and catharsis
• Pride and deception
• Pity is a persuasive technique rather than an
  ethical virtue

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News

• Thoreau
• We have to pay attention because the present is
  different from what was and what will be
• The past is solid, the future is gas, but the
  present is liquid
• Possible futures (and pasts) come into being or
  vanish with every event

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News

• The now will never leave us in peace. Whether
  we pay attention to the news or ignore it, we
  will regret it either way.

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Conclusion Augustine

• Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay
  special regard to those who, by the accidents of
  time or place or circumstance, are brought into
  closer connection with you.

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Social Science

• Evidence
• Self-denial, detachment, self-restraint
• Removes personal bias
• Skepticism toward any and all firm beliefs

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Social Science chaste discourse

• colorless style of social scientific writing
• Detached inquiry
• Franklin
• Time, not contention, is the measure of truth
  participants must restrain themselves and their
  passions in the quest for truth discourse must
  be mellow, irenic, and civil.

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Democracy

• Statistical analysislingua franca of the social
  sciences
• Data!
• Democracy is quantitative
• Reducing many voices to a single data summary
• Numbers are democracys ideal language suited
  for gods, machines, and collectives

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Objectivity Self-Mortification

• Philip Marlowe, George Smiley, John Wayne,
  Sherlock Holmes
• Doctors
• Journalists
• Enlightenment/spirituality

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Statistics

• Gods-eye vide of a spectator of the drama of
  world history
• In our private choices we unwittingly promote
  something else

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Statistics

• Few people recognize the autonomy of events from
  their own willings and doings
• Ignore individual fates
• Removes possessiveness, ego, sentimentalism
• meaningfulness lies only in the aggregate

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Statistics

• Life experiences are, in a sense, artifacts of
  insufficient sampling
• illusions of selfhood
• statistical discipline teaches us to place the
  other before the self

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Stories v. Statistics

• Stories
• Fudge details
• Compress characters and events
• Teach the ethic of caring

• Statistics
• Tell it all
• Give us the grand pattern(s)
• Teach the ethic of not caring