Dr Neal Curtis, writing on Newsroom, doesn’t have much time for liberal notions of “the democratic public sphere”, for “the marketplace of ideas” or for the claim “more speech is better than less”. He seems sceptical about the idea of freedom of speech as an essential democratic value.
We have a bit more time for these ideas than he does, so thought it worthwhile to pick up a few of the topics he touches on.
Let’s start with the Enlightenment, whose ideals Curtis sees as underpinning modern ideas about free speech, but which he also thinks was “crucial to the development of empire”. Empires have actually been around at least since Sargon of Akkad’s takeover of Mesopotamia in the twenty-fourth century BC, and have been a fixture of global history ever since, from China to Mesoamerica. And, for what it’s worth, it was only in the centuries following the Enlightenment that imperialism came to be widely discredited.
Free speech, meanwhile, has been associated with democracy at least since the ancient Greeks. Even if it was an invention of the Enlightenment, of course, that wouldn’t make it any less universally applicable. After all, the fact calculus was first discovered by seventeenth-century Europeans (Isaac Newton, if you’re English; Gottfied Wilhelm Leibniz, if you’re German) hasn’t stopped it from being used all around the world.
Curtis’s next substantial point is that nobody, not even an egg-head like Newton or Leibniz, is completely rational. We all look at the world through our own biases and blind-spots, and we all have a tendency toward certain types of flawed inferences and faulty assumptions.
That’s absolutely correct, as the last few decades of research in the behavioural sciences have amply confirmed. But that doesn’t mean “the rules of rational debate” are a sham, as Curtis seems to think.
In fact, it’s precisely why we need them in the first place. We’re all liable to tribalism and need rules that remind us there’s a better way of doing things. And it’s precisely because we all have biases that we’ve developed practices to help us reduce their distorting effects.
One of these practices is the scientific method, a central purpose of which is to stop our biases getting in the way of the truth (this is why ‘double blind’ trials are the gold standard in medical research). Another is the habit of discussing our ideas openly in the public sphere, which allows the biases we have to be corrected and counteracted by others.
All of which brings us to the next issue we want to raise. Curtis’s complaint about the marketplace of ideas is that it is “assumed to be a completely level playing field free from power”. But again, this gets things the wrong way around. It’s precisely because some people are more powerful than others that democrats have historically been the leading proponents of free speech.
Why exactly? Because free speech has repeatedly proven one of the most powerful aids to marginalised people looking to defend their rights. Female emancipation, the civil rights movement, gay liberation—all these transformations depended on their proponents’ ability (often bitterly contested and hard-won) to press their case in public.
That’s why Curtis's criticism of the signatories of the recent Harper’s magazine letter in defence of free speech is so puzzling. We don’t understand, for example, how a letter defending everybody’s freedom to express ideas can be described as “gatekeeping”. It strikes us as more like throwing the gates open (or, at least, trying to stop them from being slammed shut).
Curtis suggests the internet has raised the spectre of what journalist Peter Pomerantsev has called “censorship through noise”, according to which free speech allows some people to silence others with torrents of falsehood and abuse. Curtis concludes from this that “it does seem that some limit on speech is needed”.
But who is going to have the power of deciding what constitutes mere noise and what constitutes legitimate speech? A committee? If so, how are we going to make sure its members don’t give into the kinds of biases and blind-spots (especially when it comes to people they don’t agree with) of which Curtis has rightly reminded us? And, in any case, wouldn’t a committee overseeing what people can and can’t say provide a better example of ‘gatekeeping’ than an open letter to Harper’s?
All this might lead us to the conclusion that the best solution is, after all, for us to let everyone speak their minds freely and to try to be tolerant toward people we don’t agree with. Besides helping us to get a clearer view of things by counteracting each other’s biases and blind-spots, discussing things openly and politely has one, final great advantage: it’s just so much more pleasant than the alternatives.
It can also be a lot easier than it’s sometimes made out to be. If this article can serve as a reminder of that (whatever you think of our other points), we’ll be more than satisfied. Things are a lot better when we can disagree about things, even in public, without anyone feeling the need to doubt their opponent’s good faith. That’s something New Zealanders are, at least for the moment, especially good at. Let’s keep it that way.
Dr James Kierstead is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures and Dr Michael Johnston is Associate Dean (Academic) in the Wellington Faculty of Education at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
Read the original article on Newsroom.