For anyone who has read my stuff here, I appreciate the patronage 🙂 But since I’ve already got a dedicated author website setup, I thought I’d migrate this content and effort from here to there.
So head on over to www.calebwachter.com/blog if you’d like to keep abreast of my musings!
Why burn a book? Seriously, I’m asking an honest question. Why burn a book, or throw it in a landfill, or otherwise discard it in such a manner that it becomes extraordinarily unlikely that it will ever be read again?
I ask this not because I fail to comprehend the reasons why book burnings generally occur; I ask simply in the hope that someone, somewhere, might present a reasonable argument for destroying a record of information, however dubious its value might be.
Recently, 1948 copies of a Pippi Longstocking children’s book were disposed of by Swedish libraries. The cited reasons include the standard ‘we just needed more shelf space’ deflections, but ultimately they provided the ideological reason in a press release, with the operative (translated) excerpt below:
“The libraries in the municipality of Botkyrka have culled editions of Astrid Lindgren’s ‘Pippi in the South Seas’ where there are obsolete expression that can be perceived as racist, but Botkyrka Library have also bought the publisher’s new edition of the book from 2015 where the obsolete expression have been replaced by more contemporary expressions.”
Kinda hard to toe the ‘we just needed more shelf space’ line after that doozy, eh?
Look, I appreciate the driving force behind this: people don’t want others to be unnecessarily offended, and flipping open a celebrated children’s book to find words that are contemporaneously offensive isn’t exactly how someone envisioned spending their precious bedtime minutes with their child. But, as Janne Josefsson put it, ““There’s something in me that says, wait a second now, are we really going to let these things disappear? Shouldn’t they be allowed to survive so that I can tell my child that this is how they talked in those days?”
Isn’t that ultimately the point of sitting down and reading a bedtime story to a child: to help expand their understanding of the world they live in, in a relatable and entertaining fashion using memorable characters and scenes as delivery vehicles?
Human history is littered with examples of book burning, and each instance has the potential to be nothing short of catastrophic for our entire species. That should sound insane to anyone who isn’t a hardcore Free Speech supporter, but it doesn’t take too much evidence and conjecture to paint a fairly damning picture when it comes to the destruction of information.
The Ancient Greek scholars had so many things figured out thousands of years before their European successors finally put them together. Basic orbital mechanics, automated machinery, rudimentary chemistry, and (unfortunately) unknowable other fields had already been delved into by the great minds of the Golden Age. Where might humanity be, today, if we had not discarded the fruits of their learning and experimentation? Might we already have colonized the Solar System? Perhaps. Might we have cured devastating maladies such as cancer? Perhaps.
The point is: we’ll never know, because we literally burned so much collected knowledge and wisdom that there is no way of knowing how far back we set ourselves by doing so.
Look, I get it. It’s Pippi Longstocking, not William Shakespeare. Except…how do we know which information will prove instrumental in shaping a given mind? Maybe–just maybe!–reading those old Pippi Longstocking books, with their crass and potentially derogatory phrases from yesteryear, would spur a young, would-be reformer’s mind into changing the world. After all, do we truly know what spurred some of history’s greatest social reformers to transform the way we think of the world and the people in it? Even those reformers themselves could not say, with any degree of certainty, which combination of experiences led them to become who they later became.
And that’s the danger of burning books. No matter what the motivation for doing so might be, the risk is simply too great that we might destroy a crucial link in the chain of human knowledge and experience. Maybe the sanitized version of Pippi Longstocking is less offensive and more politically correct–and maybe, just maybe, that’s the exact opposite direction from which we should be heading.
Maybe–just maybe–we should be exposing ourselves and our children to offensive information from time to time, for the direct purpose of kindling whatever sparks might be buried so deep within our minds that even we aren’t aware of them. Maybe–just maybe–that’s the only way that meaningful change (indeed, meaningful progress) can be made.
The real reason people burn books is because they are afraid and lazy. They’re afraid that maybe–just maybe–the ideas to which they’ve clung for as long as they can remember are not the strongest ones out there. These people are afraid that if their ideas are challenged, their weaknesses will be exposed and, by extension, the people who promulgated them will lose face.
And book burners are lazy because, in the end, the best way to refine ideas is by taking them into battle in the arena of ideas and smashing them against other ideas as vigorously as possible. This process–called ‘debate’–is how we improve our collective understanding of which ideas are strong and which ideas are weak. Books are records of such arguments, and as such we do ourselves a grave disservice by destroying such records. In effect, we force ourselves–or our inheritors–to re-learn lessons which had already been learned by destroying information of any kind.
If an idea is harmful, demonstrate its harm using evidence and logic. And if a book contains weak ideas, don’t burn it–make everyone you know read it, along with a book that has stronger ideas! Not everyone will come away with the same impression of the information to which they were exposed in the process of such reading, but that’s not really the point is it? Diversity is our greatest strength since it encourages variation in our strengths and weaknesses; Conformity does nothing more effectively than instill the same weaknesses in everyone. And there is no greater diversity than diversity of thought.
So seriously: stop burning books. Stop censoring books. Stop stifling speech. If you think that words are irksome, or an idea that someone expresses is ‘problematic’ or otherwise weak, do some research, collect some data, compose your arguments, and go compete with them in the arena of ideas. Don’t censor their words, burn their books, or otherwise erase a portion of our collected human knowledge. And if you don’t feel up to the challenge of personally debating someone on an issue, your research will invariably lead you to people who can wage–and already are waging!–this particular battle for similar reasons to your own.
Who knows? You just might encounter some information that challenges your underlying assumptions during your exposure to this new information. Or you might encounter something that galvanizes your thoughts and resolve in such a way that you feel emboldened to personally wade into battle in the arena of ideas. Maybe you’ll win more than you lose, and maybe you’ll lose more than you win, but no matter how the score card looks you’ll end up with more information, and greater perspective, than you had going in. Is that really such a bad thing?
Or you could just burn the books and prevent that kind of Dangerous thing from ever happening–for anyone.
We get to make the world we live in so, in the end, it’s up to you.
Censors and others who oppose Free Speech will often declare, straight-faced and with absolute sincerity, that speaking (certain) words is analogous to perpetrating physical violence against another human being. While I’m sympathetic to some of the concern regarding the negative impact of abusive speech on long-term cognitive development, especially during childhood, I’m rather less inclined to support the notion that the impact of Bad Words on the life of an adult can be analogous to a physical (or sexual) assault.
Even the NYT author’s lead-in example in the first linked article above, of a threat of violence vs. the actual violence itself, is misleading: the whole reason a person would fear, and/or be ‘traumatized’ by, a threat of violence is because the violence itself is a very real possibility. Under these circumstances, we call such words ‘intimidation,’ and they fall outside the umbrella of protection afforded by the First Amendment.
So yes, intimidation is bad. The Supreme Court agrees that it’s bad, and consistently rejects threats of violence, or intimidation, as being covered under the Free Speech clause in the USA’s Constitution. It’s not the words themselves that are harmful, but rather the message that the words communicate (in the case of intimidation, the threat of harm). Just like with any other form of idea.
And fundamentally that’s what the Free Speech argument has been, is, and will always be about: the communication of ideas. The words used to convey ideas are merely vehicles, but they are crucially-important vehicles because, without them, humans could not meaningfully exchange information with one another. And this leads to an age-old dichotomy: centralization vs. de-centralization.
In the wonderful world of the internet, the earliest Tech Titans cut vast swaths through the data wilderness by centralizing the processing and disbursement of information at various nexus points (Amazon, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc..). These Titans understood perfectly well that we live in an Information Age, and that whoever controls the flow of information controls the economies which invariably spring up around it. For decades now it has seemed immutable that the Big Tech companies would continue to get bigger as they metastasize and insinuate themselves into seemingly irrelevant markets, eventually consuming everything–including each other.
But now there seems hope that, instead of this singularity of centralization, the internet is about to take a hard turn toward decentralization. Blockchain is just one mechanism which might provide for a greater decentralization of information dissemination and processing–and, as the Founding Fathers of the USA so epically demonstrated in accordance with Western Civilization’s long history of pursuing and promoting liberty, decentralization of government, markets, and pretty much every other human endeavor benefits more members of a society than any other framework available to us.
Now, naturally, the Powers That Be will not approve of such a radical decentralization. The Powers That Be are never in favor of anything which curtails their own power and prestige, and that’s natural. In a way, it’s even good since it forces reformers to make sure their ideas are ready for showtime before they wrest control over whatever endeavors were previously governed by the Central Authorities.
So, I said all of that to say… 😉
Each of us humans is, in essence, an information processing node. We each encounter and digest unique buffets of experience and information, and we do our best to make use of that information in our daily lives. None of us are perfect at this–in fact, many of us are downright terrible at it. But when millions of us get together and collectively make decisions, using our unique experiences individually as frames of reference, we tend to do pretty great things and then build on them with even greater things. It may sound trite, but without the decentralized nature of a free marketplace none of the advances which propelled humanity forward over the last couple centuries would have been possible.
Thomas Jefferson once said, “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” He was arguing for greater dissemination of information from person-to-person, and he believed (as I believe) that the best way to disseminate information is from one person to another, not from a central apparatus. How hard do you listen to the nightly newscast featuring a story on local crime? And how hard do you listen to a trusted friend’s story about encountering local crime? The difference is obvious to any reasonable person, which is why we must insist, categorically and without fail, that Freedom of Speech be upheld and defended every time it is attacked. Words convey ideas and, in the absence of intimidation, those ideas have the potential to improve humanity’s overall enlightenment–albeit one person at a time.
Which leaves the ‘words as weapons’ trope firmly in the realm of fantasy–where it belongs:
It often seems these two facets are rarely in synergy, and such an observation is far from without merit. Since the human race took its first steps toward civilization, the myriad social forces which make us what we are (piety, sexuality, filial loyalty, community, etc..) are in constant conflict with one another. Each of us possesses a unique blend of these social forces acting upon, within, and through us–I believe we are, as most cognitive neuroscientists claim, observers of these forces more than we are those forces–and as a result we each have individuated compatibility and incompatibility with the world around us.
For some people, piety is of the utmost importance. For others, sexuality takes precedence. For others, community, and for still others the base, animal need to compete tops the list. Since each of us is different in this regard, fashioning ‘perfect’ or ‘utopian’ social systems is not only a doomed endeavor, it actually subverts the way we think about our fellow humans. Studying this phenomenon, one comes across useful paradigms such as ‘nature vs. nurture,’ or even ‘authoritarianism vs. libertarianism.’ But the paradigm I wish to examine today is one of ‘family vs. duty.’
As many of my readers already know, I’m quite fond of the Chinese classic, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Within those pages is, I believe, the clearest and most useful primer on human psychology & sociology that has ever been put down in easy-to-digest form. The way this novel has earned such high marks in my esteem is the way it examines human nature from multiple perspectives, across generations and through dozens of different characters. The basic conflicts in the book, as in life itself, are far from uncommon when you break them down to their base components. In fact, as with any successful work of fiction, it is not the conflict itself (which serves merely as a setting) which makes a story worth hearing and retelling–it’s the actions and reactions of the characters navigating the conflict which makes it resonant with our psyches.
A major player in the early chapters of Romance of the Three Kingdoms (hereafter referred to as ROTK) is the valiant, headstrong warrior, Lü Bu. ROTK is a fantasy novel that is based, with surprising accuracy and faithfulness, on a collection of historical records often referred to as ‘Record of the Three Kingdoms,’ much of which was assembled in the immediate aftermath of the more than century long conflict. In the novel, Lü Bu is the equivalent of a modern day mega-star athlete: everyone wants him on their team, and he lives a prestigious life as a result. How much of this characterization is accurate of the real man is difficult to say, but one thing we know for certain is that the author of ROTK, Luo Guanzhong, took significant liberties with Lü Bu’s character–specifically regarding his marital/familial status.
In the historical records, Lü Bu had a wife and children to whom he was apparently quite faithful; in the fictional ROTK, he spends most of his page time pursuing a purely fictional character, Diaochan, who serves as a sublimely elegant vehicle for a handful of narrative plot points. But in both the historical and fictional accounts of the story, Lü Bu–who is easily the most vaunted and feared warrior in the known world–eventually finds himself caught in a dilemma: to be a good father/husband, or to be a good military commander. He chose the former, and soon thereafter was captured and executed by his rivals.
The differences between Eastern and Western Civilization are vast and difficult to pin down, but the ‘family vs. duty’ paradigm provides a rather clear view of some small portion of those differences–and the tale of Lü Bu choosing to stay at his family’s side in their hour of need, rather than to lead his men in battle against the enemy, is one that resonates far more clearly in the East than it does in the West. Let’s look at a couple more situations from the novel which further serve to illustrate this paradigm.
Xu Shu was a strategist and advisor in the Three Kingdoms period. He was something of the low-man-on-the-totem-pole in his peculiarly successful clique of fellow scholars and masterminds, but his skills still saw him direct the utter rout of Cao Ren during Xu Shu’s brief tenure at Liu Bei’s side (Liu Bei would later declare himself King, and eventually Emperor, after conquering roughly half of China at the height of his kingdom, Shu-Han’s, success).
Xu Shu helped direct Liu Bei’s forces–which had been without a truly capable ‘Director General’ until that point, and had suffered humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat as a result–to victory over one of Cao Cao’s most capable commanders, Cao Ren. Shortly after that victory, Cao Cao–knowing perfectly well how dangerous Liu Bei would be if he retained the services of someone like Xu Shu–hatched a scheme by imprisoning Xu Shu’s mother in the Capitol City, Xuchang, and sending a forged letter (ostensibly from her) requesting Xu Shu return to Xuchang immediately to spare her further indignity and shame. Xu Shu is torn by the event, and even knows that it’s a plot of Cao Cao’s doing, but ultimately he abandons his post as Director General to go see to his mother.
When he arrives, his mother is initially happy to see him–but when she realizes he fell for Cao Cao’s plot, she scolds him mercilessly for stepping away from his post at Liu Bei’s side. Shortly thereafter, she commits suicide in despair (think about that for a moment…) and Xu Shu remains a prisoner of Cao Cao for the rest of his life.
Later on in the book, one of the most epic sequences in that story unfolds prior to the Battle of Chi Bi (Red Cliff, popularized most recently on film by John Woo). That sequence involves one of Liu Bei’s bravest warriors, Zhao Yun, rescuing Liu Bei’s infant son from Cao Cao’s army. In the 2010 TV series, Three Kingdoms, this rescue sequence takes up the better part of an entire episode, and during the fight to safety Zhao Yun constantly shields the baby from harm–going so far as to sling the child across his chest with a makeshift harness–while battling through Cao Cao’s legion.
Zhao Yun suffers numerous wounds, and ultimately fails to protect Liu Bei’s wife (who, knowing Zhao Yun would never abandon her, suicidally threw herself down a well to make possible Zhao Yun’s escape with the infant) but does manage to return to Liu Bei with the infant child safely strapped to his chest. Exhausted, bloodied, and beaten from the fight, Zhao Yun presents the ‘young lord’ to Liu Bei on bended knee, apologizing profusely for his failure to save Liu Bei’s wife. Liu Bei accepts the child, takes one look at it, and then does something that takes everyone by surprise.
He throws the baby onto the ground in disgust, never taking his eyes off Zhao Yun.
Zhao Yun is stunned, but Liu Bei clutches the dauntless warrior in his embrace and says in no uncertain terms that he values Zhao Yun’s life far more than ANY infant’s, and that he could not bear to have lost Zhao Yun for such a small thing as an infant child.
And for the full weight of this to sink in, you’ve got to understand: Liu Bei is the absolute, uncontested, 100% HERO of this story. His quest is to restore the Han Dynasty while every other warlord of the land seeks to carve his own piece off for himself or, more usually, wants to become Emperor for himself. The whole world knows of Liu Bei’s virtue, his sincerity, his piety, and his honor.
And he tossed his infant son on the ground in disgust–an act which earns him significant praise and approval from the rest of his followers.
Later on in the same story, when Liu Bei is attempting to recruit the disguised Pang Tong into his army, Liu Bei once again ignores his child in favor of pursuing a talented officer for his organization. He’s making clear that whenever there’s a conflict between family and duty, he will choose the latter every time. On his death bed, he even goes so far as to tell his most trusted and valued adviser (Zhuge Liang) that if his son proves incapable of providing the necessary leadership for his kingdom, Zhuge Liang is to depose him and assume the throne for himself so that the work of Shu-Han (his kingdom) can be fulfilled.
The ‘family vs. duty’ paradigm is one that intrudes into nearly all of our lives, and usually on a daily basis. That’s why the scenes described above resonate with ROTK readers (and that resonance underpins my great respect and appreciation for the novel), and in the end scenes like Liu Bei tossing his child onto the ground are supposed to shock the audience/readership–likewise, scenes like the one where Lü Bu hesitates to lead his army due to concern for his loved ones are supposed to make the audience/readership empathize with the man. We all understand why he did what he did, which is why his end is such a tragedy. Even Xu Shu’s flight to Xuchang, to look after his elderly mother, is something each of us could see ourselves doing–and even defending as the Right Thing To Do(tm).
In the end, there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ responses to the ‘family vs. duty’ conflict. There are only human responses, which run the gamut and include those described above. One fascinating thing to me is how the East and the West differ so fundamentally on this point: in China, for example, social unity and harmony are more greatly valued than liberalism and freedom are, compared to the West . Still, true solidarity in either Eastern or Western culture is far from reality, and likely can never fully be achieved in spite of the best efforts of those cultures’ leaders–leaders like William Shakespeare, Luo Guanzhong, Thomas Jefferson, or anyone else who’s put pen to paper in an effort to identify and comment fundamental human truths.
Culture definitely matters in terms of cultivating preferences in conflicts like ‘family vs. duty’, but superiority and inferiority are probably impossible to totally establish when comparing and contrasting different cultural impacts on the world. Some cultures foster expression at the expense of productivity, while others focus on productivity to the near-exclusion of all else. It seems apparent that a given culture will outperform another if the variables are to its advantage, whereas it might take a subtle tweak of those same variables to flip the advantage from one side to the other. It seems to me, however, that there’s a great opportunity for each of us to learn a little more about our fellow humans by examining relatively stark cultural differences like those between the East and West on issues like Family vs. Duty.
And at the end of the day, we should all be seeking to expand our understanding of the world around us–which includes our fellow humans.
I happened upon a picture of Tank Man (aka: Tank Boy, Unknown Protestor, Unknown Rebel) and got to thinking about the act of opposing tyranny. Every election cycle it seems that Western nations are inundated with accusations of tyranny aimed at whoever happened to stroll into the land’s highest office. But it doesn’t take much in the way of objectivity to recognize that the vast majority of these accusations are purely partisan. That doesn’t mean they should be roundly ignored–just that they should be taken with a pound or two of salt.
To go with that dose of skepticism, one should take a good look at how people conduct themselves while purporting to ‘stand tall’ against such abuses of power. Too often we see people strip their clothing off in public, cut and dye their hair some uniform manner (while also, somewhat comically I might add, often claiming said cut-and-dye to represent their individuality…), or burning signs in public, somewhat shockingly demonstrating their ignorance of the very issue which they claim motivated their march. Sometimes the harder among such ‘protesters’ will actually engage in physical violence and intimidation–but too often in modern examples of such political protests these acts of violence almost exclusively target other protesters.
There’s nothing brave or heroic about squaring off with some rando in street clothes who just happens to think differently from you. That’s antisocial behavior by any reasonable or colloquial definition of the term.
So if there was any question about what Standing Tall in the face of tyranny actually looks like, I’ll do my best to provide a definitive answer with this iconic picture.
Standing in front of a literal tank column, a day after one of the most publicized displays of tyranny in modern times, and refusing to move aside–and even going so far as to climb on top of one of the tanks!–is certainly a reckless act, and possibly a suicidal one. But it’s also quite clearly motivated by a deep-seated opposition to tyranny.
Dying one’s hair, and hiding behind masks while intimidating your fellow citizens, doesn’t belong in the same discussion as genuine acts of political protest like the one Tank Man treated his fellow humans to on June 5, 1989.
Anyone who has read my fiction knows that I have a soft spot for the literary masterpiece, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is counted as one of the Four Classics of Chinese literature. For those unfamiliar with the novel, or with Chinese culture in general, it’s worth investigating (though there are no official subtitle tracks of acceptable quality for the latest television version, Three Kingdoms (2010), so you’ll have to watch it on YouTube where the Jiang Hu translation was hardsubbed into the video itself).
The clip I’ve linked within this article requires a little backstory to fully understand. Pang Tong is a hideously ugly man with one of his era’s brightest minds, and is therefore highly sought after by all of the warlords of his day. To avoid being imprisoned and compelled to work for one of the less high-minded warlords, he spends most of his life wandering under various aliases in search of a worthy lord and master.
His search first brought him to Sun Quan, the lord of the second most powerful kingdom of the day. But Sun Quan was persuaded by his court (and his mother) to shun Pang Tong due to Pang’s obtuse, drunken belligerence at a state funeral for Sun Quan’s deceased Grand Commander, Zhou Yu. Pang Tong’s belligerence and drunkenness were considered to be insults of such magnitude that he was rejected from a face-to-face meeting with Sun Quan, at which point Pang Tong sighed and left Sun Quan’s kingdom in search of a worthier lord.
He arrived in Liu Bei’s relatively small, but quickly-growing kingdom and presented himself as a potential clerk or low-level magistrate. He barely managed to simultaneously avoid detection and also get a job as a magistrate of a small village/township on the outskirts of Liu Bei’s kingdom, and after he got the job he descended into drunkenness and belligerence yet again. He also refused to do any administrative tasks for his first month (edit to correct: it was actually his first 100 days) on the job, drawing the ire of the feisty Zhang Fei–Liu Bei’s sworn brother–who paid Pang Tong a visit with every intention of cracking his skull for insubordination.
Pang Tong, still drunk and belligerent, dismissed Zhang Fei’s concerns. He said that the work of a low-level magistrate was beneath him, so why should he bother to work every day when the job could be done much more efficiently? Zhang Fei commands him to ‘put up or shut up,’ and over the course of the ensuing afternoon Pang Tong completes all of the unaddressed administrative tasks–all while drinking like a sailor–and, after completing these tasks, retires to his room for even more drunkenness.
Zhang Fei, who is far from the sharpest tack in the box, runs back to his brother Liu Bei and pleads with him to come see Pang Tong (who is still operating under an alias) for himself. Liu Bei drops everything he is doing, rushes off to meet with Pang Tong, and patiently waits outside Pang Tong’s residence until the spud-faced genius finally emerges in a hangover–and naturally he demands someone refill his wine.
Liu Bei recognized the value of such a brilliant and eccentric person, and bent over backwards to try to recruit him. He ignored his own sick child, he ignored the matter of his noble rank and Pang Tong’s commoner status, he even went so far as to try to give his horse, Hex Mark (which had saved his life) to Pang Tong as a parting gift.
Pang Tong pushed Liu Bei as far as he could in trying to determine whether or not Liu Bei’s ‘eye was on the prize,’ as it were. A truly worthy leader needs to think of nothing but success for himself and the people who are with him. Pang Tong’s point is simple: if a leader is willing to pass up the opportunity to pluck a diamond from a pile of manure simply because the act of doing so might somehow sully him, he is unworthy of the diamond.
Humility, as Liu Bei demonstrates time and time again throughout the Romance of the Three Kingdoms tale, is a potent weapon which can often prove decisive in crucial matters.
The ‘Left vs. Right‘ paradigm is one that’s dying, and its pending demise is necessary if we want to build on the legitimate progress made by our forebears. But in today’s world, those labels still have meaning and so I’ll discuss them a little before examining (in admittedly verbose and, at times, rambling fashion) their roles in the ongoing Free Speech battle in Western Civilization.
The concept of a linear, one-dimensional political spectrum which starts at the ‘Right’ end of the line and runs to the ‘Left’ is one with which most of us are familiar. The idea is simple (which is why we all have a meaningful degree of familiarity and understanding with this paradigm): if you’re on the Right side of the spectrum, you’re a ‘Conservative‘ (meaning you err toward caution when presented with opportunities to reform a given facet of society/tradition) and if you’re on the Left side, you’re a ‘liberal’ (though this label no longer means what it ought to, so a better way to think of someone on the Left is as a Progressive). But what does any of that even mean? This post isn’t an attempt to answer that particular question–instead, it’s an attempt to determine why that question is one most of us find ourselves asking at one point or another.
There is also a lot of discussion about ‘horseshoe theory‘ when discussing the Left vs. Right (predominantly false) dichotomy. Most of us will hear people say ‘I’m a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal,’ or some variation on that theme, which suggests that in spite of its simplicity a lot of people are still confused by the ultra-simplified Left vs. Right paradigm.
And they should be confused, because asking someone if they are on the Left or the Right of the political is a rigged question for anyone who’s actually interested in learning the answer. But more on that later. As the headline suggests, this essay is primarily about the purpose and value of free speech in Western society.
To understand why Free Speech is even a thing, we need to understand our species’ history to a minimum degree. Throughout human history, there have been people who wanted to dictate, from positions of authority, how others lived. An accurate term used to describe these people is ‘Authoritarian‘–and the dirty little secret that we’re waking up to is that Authoritarians aren’t uniquely ‘Left,’ or ‘Right,’ or ‘Religious,’ or anything else. Authoritarianism is hard-coded into human nature, so learning how to deal with it and keep it in check is important.
That’s where Free Speech comes into play.
Back in the 60s the Free Speech movement was most certainly ‘Leftist’ or, more pointedly, anti-Right/anti-Conservative. And they were right to rail against the excesses of state influence over speech, thought, and media. Having been born long after their rebellion’s flames had turned to smoldering embers, I can’t comment directly on the radicals’ motives–thankfully I’ve got people like Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers (aka, The Factual Feminist), both dyed-in-the-wool feminists and free speakers from that era, to do that for me.
Back in the 60’s, it seems to me that a major (probably even primary) reason for the government stepping in as hard as it did in attempting to influence culture, thought, and speech, was deceptively simple: the global rise of communism. The government, falling into a trap as old as vested power itself, decided against battling the core *ideas* of communism in the marketplace of ideas and instead decided to apply state force to keep communism from gaining purchase. Those in power, be they in the government, media, or even the business world, opted to employ Authoritarian tactics to coerce conformity in the 1950’s rather than waging the harder, but more meaningful battle in the arena of ideas. Their intentions might have been good, and it’s hard to argue with any chosen course that seeks to eradicate the real-world horrors of communism from the face of the planet, but you probably already know where a road paved with good intentions might lead…
Fast forward to today and the script has flipped 100% on just about every single issue. The hard ‘Left’ activists are pro-communism, and they gain immense support in the media and popular culture while people who want the country to go back to the way it was are sneered at by virtually everyone with a microphone or live camera feed. The pendulum swung too far to the Right in the 50’s and 60’s, and now it’s gone too far to the Left to lead off this century. And the most powerful, nonlethal weapon in our arsenal which we can use to dampen the eccentricities of that pendulum’s increasingly severe movement is Free Speech.
The good news is that we’ve been through cultural upheavals like this before. We’re all still here, the skyscrapers in our metropolises are still standing, the heartland continues to be the beating heart of both our economy and identity, and all in all life keeps a-goin’. So with that in mind it becomes important to recognize that cultural revolutions are not only acceptable, they’re NECESSARY. Such revolutions are a core reason why the First Amendment got top billing over the Second Amendment. It’s better to wage a war of ideas than it is to wage a war of arms, so Free Speech got primacy over all other itemized freedoms in the USA’s founding principles. But in order for a real war of ideas to commence, all involved parties need to have the unrestricted ability to transmit, receive, and process information independently.
It’s probably obvious by now that Free Speech and Authoritarianism cannot coexist. Free Speech was specifically designed to prevent Authoritarianism from dominating society by distributing information-processing throughout society rather than keeping information-processing (and, by extension, decision-making) sequestered within the Corridors of Power. So naturally Authoritarians want to be able to control what is or isn’t said by the general public–because they know, just like Mr. Style Over Substance Noam Chomsky himself knows, that language plays a crucial role in shaping much of how we think. So if an Authoritarian can control how a person speaks, he/she also gains control over how that person thinks. None of this is rocket surgery, but I think it warrants stating anyway.
I’ve got more to say on the subject, and I expect I’ll do just that in the weeks to come, but for now I’d like to end on a conciliatory note.
We all get into discussions with people, and where those discussions take place (on the internet, around the water cooler, in the bleachers while we watch our kids perform/compete, or anywhere else) is less important than how we conduct ourselves during them. Authoritarianism isn’t the only hard-wired piece of social psychology each of us is born with–tribalism is another one, and it’s probably even more prominent than the desire to exert power which underpins Authoritarianism. Free Speech and tribalism, however, are almost as incompatible as Free Speech and Authoritarianism–and if they’re not incompatible, per se, then they’re far from synergistic.
When we talk with like-minded people (meaning people who largely share our views) we often improve our understanding and perspective but, perhaps alarmingly, we also put ourselves in a position where we might fall victim to confirmation bias. Speaking with people who disagree with us is difficult-bordering-on-impossible, but it’s only by speaking with people who don’t share our views that we can genuinely expand our horizons and determine which ideas are strong and which ones are weak.
So the next time any of us feels like rolling our eyes and dismissing a conversation partner with whom we’ve stumbled into one of the proverbial political landmines of our time, and with whom we disagree on an important issue, take a second to realize that you have an opportunity not to win an argument or debate with that person. Instead, recognize you have a chance to lay bare each others’ ideas and supporting thoughts, evidence, and experiences in the hope that you’ll come away with a stronger understanding of the subject than you had going in.
If you can do that, you’ll recognize that precious few people are ‘Right’ or ‘Left,’ and that most of the people around you with whom you engage in vigorous, spirited, and meaningful discussions are clustered tightly around the Center–just like you.
Don’t let wedge issues divide us into a false Left vs. Right conflict. If you can avoid that particular pitfall, the Authoritarians who hail from all extreme points of the political spectrum will be every bit as powerless as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, and John Adams wanted them to be.
The tolerance of plurality is one of the West’s greatest achievements. And, indeed, tolerance is as much as a system of law can *possibly* hope to achieve. Anything more is up to the distinct, plural groups individually (how’s ‘groups individually’ for an oxymoron?).
Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist (who many consider to be the contemporary Father of Libertarianism) has a beautifully articulate speech titled ‘The Pencil,’ which I’ll link below. Key takeaway: there is not a single human being in the world who can manufacture a common pencil. The only way to make it is by cooperating with literally THOUSANDS of other people–many of whom you might despise.
One of the most profound and horribly misunderstood features of a Free Market system is that it enables people who might *hate* each other to cooperate from opposite corners of the world–so long as they all agree on the goal of prioritizing mutual gain. That fundamental agreement forms the basis of Cultural Pluralism–which, strangely enough, stands in DIRECT OPPOSITION to what *most* of us think of as contemporary Multiculturalism.
Where legitimate Cultural Pluralism and contemporary Multiculturalism differ, in my view, is simple: one advocates the TOLERANCE of divergent cultures, while the other demands EQUAL STATUS for all cultures. It’s the old ‘Equal Opportunity vs. Equal Outcome’ argument playing out in the marketplace of ideas–for that’s really all a culture is: a constellation of ideas, manifested (generally) as a set of traditional teachings, values and practices.
Tolerating ‘The Other’ is *essential* to seeking truth and achieving harmony. If one does not assume he or she Knows What Is Best on a given subject, then he or she *must* be open to new information–including the falsification of previously-held values and ideas. Once we can *tolerate* differences, we can examine them–even at arm’s length–more clearly. That process of honest, dispassionate examination is how we learn more about The Other and, more importantly, ourselves. Comparing and contrasting isn’t just something we’re supposed to do in High School English essays–it’s one of the most proven methods by which humans can learn new information: by referring an unknown item/idea to a known one.
Demanding *equal status* for The Other, however, does the exact opposite. When one demands that all cultures be TREATED equally irrespective of the apparent (and not-so-apparent) merits and flaws of each represented culture, one is circumventing the compare-and-contrast mechanism at the outset of experience with The Other. Compare-and-contrast is, fundamentally, a scientific/logical/empirical process. Disallowing its application to *anything* is anathema to the Pursuit of Truth and enlightenment generally.
Science doesn’t operate by consensus, or by ‘proving’ claims or statements. Science is a process of systematized elimination and falsification, by which statements and claims can *only* be DISproven. Which means that enduring legitimately HELPFUL criticism will *never* be a pleasant experience. But it *is* the only method by which humans have repeatedly demonstrated an ability to revise and reform traditional ideas and practices. In order to conduct such revisions, it’s necessary to remove all possible impediments from viewing angles to better ensure a clear vision of what a given thing is or is not.
After all: monkey see, monkey do.**
*The author requests your tolerance of his asterisk abuse, and wants to assure you that he holds no grudge against Roger Maris.
**This post originally appeared at drdetectovision.wordpress.com as a comment in a thread discussing a recent article by Katie Hopkins.
Revision-proof religion is revolting.
In my day job as a science fiction and fantasy writer, I get to ponder subjects for days, weeks, months and even years that most people can only processs in drive-thru fashion. A lot of my thoughts, since a very young age, have centered on religion. During my pontifications and perusals of historical records, I’ve encountered some thought-provoking and eye-opening examples of how humans interface with their religious institutions. From Thomas Jefferson’s treatise on how to encourage ideological reformations within religion, to Machiavelli’s ultra-pragmatic thoughts on how a ruler and his subjects should regard their home-grown religious institutions, we find commentary from the best and brightest of our species’ history on this all-important subject.
From Ancient Egypt’s glorious polytheistic take on divinity all the way through the American Secular Reformation and its enduring imprint on Christianity; we have a record of how religious institutions impact their respective societies. From the Cradle of Civilization with the birth of the so-called Abrahamic Religions, across the Asian continent to witness the inexorable march from Taosim, to Confucianism, to Buddhism, and back to Europe where Christianity played a pivotal role in the creation of modern Western Civilization–the far-reaching impact of religion on the way we think, speak, live, love, and learn cannot be underestimated.
I’m not a learned scholar, and I’ve never been published in the theological arena. I’m an amateur with an inquisitive mind and an openness to new ideas. As a young kid growing up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, my skepticism with religion was fairly obvious even at the age of nine. Today, I would best describe my relationship with religion by borrowing a phrase from the great Freeman Dyson (of eponymous Dyson Sphere fame, which if you’re a sci-fi nut like I am you already know how bright this guy’s light bulbs are). He said “I am a practicing Christian–I am not a believing Christian.” I take it even more broadly and expand upon that statement: “I support religion, specifically Christianity, as an empiricist and a humanist–and I don’t need to believe any of the outlandish claims made therein in order to justify that support.”
Let me be perfectly clear: I’ve got four beautiful children, and we’ve never gone to church. I’ve attended funerals during my time here in the Philippines, and many of those begin in churches, but I’ve never–not once–attended a church occasion in the last decade that wasn’t somehow associated with beginning- or end-of-life ritual ceremonies that are more or less social occasions conducted in a church. Total number of these types of events I’ve attended? Less than ten in a decade.
So don’t write me off just yet 😉 As far as my place on the atheism spectrum, I’d slot myself in shoulder-to-shoulder with Thomas Jefferson.
And so it should come as no surprise that I find Thomas Jefferson’s writings on religion to be about as dead-on as anyone’s that I’ve read. His ultimate idea was simply to make religions stand on their own feet in the court of public opinion—and to do so without co-opting government authority or corporal power in order to move hearts and minds. If the ideas being presented and preached by a church’s clergy were apparently sound, and the populace accepted them (along with their baggage) as superior to available alternatives, Jefferson appeared to think that was all the progress we needed to root out the stupidity and unwanted aspects of religion. Not instantaneously, mind you, but both he and Machiavelli (who many refer to as the ‘ultimate pragmatist’) displayed marked temperance on the issue of religion. Neither was religious by any stretch, but both of them recognized the immense culturally-stabilizing effect that religious institutions generate for their native populations. This effect cannot be ignored in any reasoned discourse on the issue of religion and its current or future roles in human affairs.
Christianity has a violent a bloody history, and *much* of that blood was shed during Christianity’s myriad Great Reformations. Whether it was the schism with the Eastern Orthodoxy (the Byzantine Empire, or Eastern Rome’s State Religion which departed from mainstream Christianity mostly in terms of decentralizing authority more than its Western counterpart), Martin Luther’s heresy (which allowed any who wished to do so the ability to read the Bible in their own time, in their own language, and in the privacy of their own homes), Henry VIII’s break with Holy Mother Church by founding the Church of England, or the American Secular Reformation, the history of Christianity is littered with the bones of ongoing ideological warfare within the religion itself–to say nothing of its ongoing feud with Islam for the last thirteen hundred years!
Thomas Jefferson wanted something different for our future. He looked back and saw all of the Great Reformations and recognized the price we paid in blood and treasure to move the ball forward a few inches. To him, as a secular humanist, that price was simply unacceptable. And so he and his contemporaries devised an ingenious, unprecedented mechanism: the Separation of Church & State. His hope was that the Great Reformations would be a thing of the past, and that replacing them would be an Ongoing Reformation with no battles, little bloodshed, and–most importantly of all–they would have no respite. In Jefferson’s mind, each reformation or revision of religious practice and dogma gives a chance to take down one more piece of the ‘artificial scaffolding’ that he talked about in his February 27, 1821 letter to Timothy Pickering. That’s primarily what the Separation of Church & State was about: the whittling away of the undesirable components to lay bare the human truths which resonate with a religion’s adherents. Sometimes (usually?) it’s three steps forward and two steps back, but on long timescales–and when left uninterrupted–meaningful progress does indeed occur.
All religion is inherently authoritarian in nature. “Because *I* said so” becomes “Because God said so,” and it’s pretty difficult to argue with an all-powerful deity. But anyone versed in the scientific method knows that the whole concept of Ultimate Truth certainly breaks down in the face of empirical evidence. Ultimate Truth was just a mechanism by which the psycho-social practices ensconced in religious dogma and tradition could be imposed more effectively than via simple suggestion and group consensus. Humans, as animals well-versed in (and well-suited to) a hierarchical social structure, generally respond better to authority than to reason. That dependence on authority should change over time (especially now that the sum total of human experience is now available on our smartphones), but it’s who we’ve always been as a species and it’s who we still are today. Ignoring that reality is foolish and self-destructive (or ‘regressive’ as people like Dave Rubin refer to the phenomenon generally).
So it becomes clear that revision is essential when it comes to religion, and any religion that disallows it isn’t worth following—and humans seem to agree with this thesis, demonstrated by the many Great Reformations, followed by the early American cottage industry of dime-a-dozen tent-pole ministries, each of which bore decreasing similarity to existing churches. And each new ‘church’ attempted to appeal to a different slice of the population pie with not only their doctrinal interpretations, but their emphasis and de-emphasis on certain passages contained within the primary doctrinal sources. That’s what peaceful religious reformation looks like, and like any other transaction in the marketplace of ideas it was best facilitated in the early USA.
Accepting that religion requires revision to remain relevant and compatible with modernity negates the vast majority of the problems anti-religious people have with religion as a human institution (the most common and sigh-inducing refrain being: “the Bible is historically inaccurate and based on superstition, THEREFORE *none* of it is worthwhile and it should *all* be ignored.” There’s a saying about babies and bathwater that applies here…). Personally, I think Thomas Jefferson hit this subject right between the eyes every time he put pen to paper on it. And a big part of why he was right has to do with his firm belief that a de-centralized decision-making apparatus, operated by everyday people living ordinary lives, is inherently superior to a centralized one with levers pulled on the highest floors of ivory towers. Cognitive dissonance plays a key role in validating his opinion of this de-centralized process’s advantages–and cognitive dissonance is especially important when it comes to religion.
Sam Harris, a cognitive neuro-scientist and philosopher of our time, does a good job discussing how cognitive dissonance plays a part in increasing the ‘rationality’ quotient of a population. Basically, the more contradictions there are in a given constellation of doctrinal sources, the more opportunities an adherent has to use his or her own judgment to determine a course of action—conflicting directives give us the opportunity to *choose* which directive we would prefer to employ, and the large-scale impact of this cannot be overstated.
In general, people (even horrifyingly bad ones) want to live in a ‘good’ world where people are courteous, trusting, and compassionate toward each other. So when we’re allowed to question a point of dogma in the manner described a few sentences up from this one, it’s an opportunity to *make* the world we want to live in without abandoning the world we were born into (a world largely defined by ensconced traditions). And that ongoing improvement is, in the end, what most all of us want—not only for our neighbors or for ourselves, but for generations yet to come. Breaking the decision-making down to the individual level, and functionally *empowering* people to make their own decision as to which doctrinal sources/passages should be more or less emphasized, is a *perfect* example of de-centralized (or distributed) decision-making superseding a centralized decision-making apparatus. Some funny conclusions can be drawn from this line of reasoning, including the seemingly bizarre one that supports the *intentional* introduction of contradictions *specifically* in order to stimulate free thought. I don’t *think* that’s what the authors and editors of the world’s holy texts were consciously trying to do when they collected the various works which comprise the world’s primary doctrinal sources, but I honestly wouldn’t put it past at least some of them. After all, we’re no *smarter* today than we were a thousand years ago. We’ve just got access to orders of magnitude more information, and we have significantly more time as individuals to ponder that information.
I obviously have more to say on this subject, and I might even write a whole book on the issue at some point, but for now I think I’ll close with the following axiom from Ancient China, along with what that means in the context of this essay:
“To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable–but to be certain is to be ridiculous.”
AnyTHING that is claimed to be perfect is necessarily immune to the process of revision, and anyONE who claims to have perfect knowledge is behaving ridiculously–and, more importantly, they are behaving regressively.
