Safe and Quiet

I was listening to a recent episode of Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast the other day; the provocatively named How America Became a Nation of “Free Speech Hypocrites.” Mr. Thompson's guest was Greg Lukianoff, and the who talked about how things have come to where they are, with the Progressive Left and the Populist Right seeming to vie for the title of Most Hostile To Speech They Don't Like.

Mr. Lukianoff made the point that the current climate of censoriousness started on the Left, in élite college campuses, and while Mr. Thompson acknowledged that, he wanted to be careful to not cast both sides of the issue as equally blameworthy, something that I came to regard as something of a fool's errand; people who are motivated to see themselves as the heroes of a story can become incensed simply at being told they're just regular people; placing any blame on their shoulders will certainly arouse their ire. More importantly, who cares where the blame lies? Unless which set of partisans originated the problem will make a material difference to crafting a solution, blame is pointless.

But the thing that disappointed me most in the conversation was the absence of any mention of "harm." Not in the sense of who was being harmed by the Trump Administration's current actions, but in the sense that the origin of "political correctness" and "cancel/accountability culture" is the idea that words can do real harm. Personally, I'm not on board with that idea myself, for the most part, and I suspect that the Civil Libertarian Left and the Libertarian Right, as Mr. Lukianoff termed them, would both agree with me on that.

And this, I think, is why the current phenomenon has its roots with the Progressive, or perhaps more accurately, Social Justice, Left. While people often regard attempts to clamp down on speech to be cynical silencing of dissenting voices in the service of power grabs, I remember the Social Justice movement as being sincerely, if overly, concerned with the importance of protecting what they saw as marginalized groups and halting the spread and/or acceptance of ideas that were openly damaging to those groups. And while the Populist Right often laughed at the idea, this wouldn't have been the first time they've adopted the language of harm and grievance once they saw its overall usefulness.

While the Trump Administration would never be particularly open about it, I suspect that they, or at least certain among them, are well aware of the fact that many American Conservatives consider themselves to be put upon, if not actively oppressed, and in need of protection, not to mention the general privileges that American culture tends to grant to those it sees as victims.

And I think that this tends to be glossed over in discussions of free speech, if for no other reason than restrictions on speech tend to call to mind cynical and/or thin-skinned autocrats. People who understand free speech to be expensive for, and dangerous to, themselves tend to have little use for it. People, like myself, who have no problem with expansive free speech rights also tend to believe that its costs are negligible at most. So it's also, I think, important for people like myself to understand that other people have very real fears, even when we don't share them. Because very few problems in the world are ever solved by forcing people to live with their fears. And this one won't either.