The danger of speech is a tricky thing to pin down. What kind of speech leads to what kind of danger? And how directly? And with how much certainty? If you incite an angry mob to pillage and burn down businesses, a mob that’s right on the cusp of relinquishing their anger in violent and destructive ways, and they go ahead and do as you say, you’re probably guilty of incitement. But you encourage a crowd of people who are passionate about a cause, but not seething with anger ready to burst, to “fight like hell,” but “peacefully” and “patriotically”, staying within the rule of law, and a violent outburst occurs from within that crowd, is it your fault? The fact is, if you say yes to the latter, you have just prohibited not just a huge swath of different kinds of speech, but probably the most important kind, the kind that motivates people to make changes for the better.
You guys in the US, and frankly all of us around the world, are balls deep in a great dilemma over free speech. The right to it hangs in the balance, and we are in a time when we have to make decisions on what speech should be allowed and what shouldn’t. We have to decide where the line is drawn.
The founding fathers of your great nation seemed to believe (though I don’t have sources to back this up) that the line should be drawn, not between different forms of speech at all, but between speech and action. So long as you don’t commit harm or destruction, so long as you remain within the bounds of the law, you can say whatever you damn well please. I like this philosophy, but I’m not sure I’m 100% on board with it, as I do think there is some weight to the argument that one can incite violence and destruction, knowingly and on purpose, with speech, and therefore ought to bear some of the responsibility for the consequences of such speech. After all, we don’t only want to punish criminal and immoral behavior but prevent it. I think Trump is faaar from that–not only because of his careful choice of words (“peacefully” and “patriotically” ← whatever that means)–but for a whole number of reasons (his calling off of the violence once he saw it was happening, the fact that they showed the storming of the Capitol to be premeditated long before Trump’s speech, and the fact that Trump urged–TWICE!!!–for the military to protect the Capitol but was denied both times), but one can easily imagine a scenario where one can take advantage of an already angry and violence-prone mob who is ready to go on a destructive rampage just by saying something that pushes them right over the edge. In other words, there are certain scenarios (imagined or real) in which triggering an angry mob to do violence and destruction is as easy and can be done as deliberately as pulling the trigger on a gun. If you know what you’re doing, and you have influence, I think you should bear some responsibility for inciting riots, harm, and destruction. I agree with the founding fathers that those who directly commit the acts of harm and destruction ought to bear the full brunt of their responsibility and the consequences of their actions, but I don’t think that in all circumstances, it is only them who bear such burden. Those who trigger them–knowingly and deliberately–also bear a burden.
But the question is: where do you draw the line? Who am I to say where the line is drawn? Who is anyone?
Who is… Jordan Peterson?
Well, I don’t think Jordan possesses any more of a god’s eye view than anyone else. He certainly isn’t any less biased or subjective in his views than the next guy (well… there might be a gradient there between people, but he certainly isn’t without bias or subjectivity). But he does have an excellent quote which I think captures the perfect place to draw the line:
“There’s a difference between saying that there’s something you can’t say and saying that there are things that you have to say.”
We’ve lived with laws against hate speech for a while now, and though many still protest against it and want to go back to a time before speech of any kind was prohibited, I don’t think society has broken down because of this. But the minute you force people to say certain things (like, in Jordan’s case, being forced by law to address a person by their preferred pronoun despite that they are not their preferred pronoun), you are living under a tyranny, for now they can make you say whatever they want, thereby killing free speech.
One might argue that banning certain speech acts (Searle’s term) and forcing certain speech acts are two sides of the same coin. To ban a speech act just is to force the opposite speech act. If I am banned from saying “The holocaust never happened” then I am forced to say “The holocaust did happen.” Well, not so fast. If you’re not allowed to say X, you can always stay silent. Furthermore, you can always think of clever ways of saying the same thing in different, perhaps obscure, words–perhaps words with a double meaning so that there is deniability. Or maybe think of a completely different thing to say that achieves the same ends (ex. if your point is to show how the media and historians are corrupt liars, you might want to propose that the holocaust never happened, but you wouldn’t be limited to that example… you could bring up a different example that isn’t banned). The point is, when you ban certain speech, you are usually left with several alternative options. But when you are forced to say certain speech, you are effectively forced towards that one speech–no options, no alternative things to say–no “you can go anywhere but there” and instead “you must go here”.
There might be one loop hole in the compelled speech that allows you to get away with expressing your actual views–and again it comes out of Searle–the utterance: “X is the case, but I don’t believe X.” ← Searle considered this an absurd statement to make and questioned its utility. But here, I think, we find utility. If you are compelled by law to say X, then in that utterance, you are saying X. You’re just following that up with an additional statement about the state of your beliefs. Note that you aren’t exactly stating that X isn’t true. You’re making a statement about the state of your mind, of your beliefs, which is no different than making a statement about anyone’s beliefs–it states a fact about their state of mind regardless of the truth of that state, that belief. If anti-free-speech advocates want to silence statements about the state of your beliefs, they are treading a very thin line dividing the suppression of speech and the suppress of thought itself–another very significant line that can be drawn but not between different types of speech but between speech and thought–a place we should–never–go.
I know there’s gonna be opinions all over the map on this one. Some are gonna say all speech should be allowed. There are some who are gonna say not only should certain speech acts be condemned, but certain thought acts as well. I propose Jordan’s line as a reasonable compromise. It seems right there in the middle. It seems it divides the kinds of speech limits we’ve lived with for a while without experiencing too much of a deterioration in daily life and the kinds we most likely will not be able to live with. Not everybody will be happy with this, of course, but when you’ve got a nation torn amongst itself, indeed a world, on the issue of what speech should be allowed and what speech shouldn’t–with plenty on the fringes of each side–I think we’re gonna have to compromise.
If Biden is serious about “uniting” the nation, I want to propose to him that he start with Peterson’s quote.