Monday, October 29, 2018

Free Speech and Its Present Crisis: In today's America, the right to express one's opinion is threatened by activists and authorities alike.

Nearly a century after free speech became the unambiguous law of the land, it is nonetheless losing its sway over public opinion.

What serves to sort out the speech that does from the speech that does not deserve the shield of the First Amendment? Rouse's answer is culture: "Culture is what helps us determine the appropriateness of speech by balancing our rights as enshrined in the Constitution with understandings of context." And by culture, Rouse means her vision of culture.

"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist," Douglass said in 1860, adding that "Slavery cannot tolerate five years of free speech." Or George Orwell: "If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." Or John Milton: "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." Or even the pre-Gramscian Marxist Rosa Luxemburg: "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for one who thinks differently ... because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic."

Rouse is also correct to say that there are different arenas of speech and that suppression of free speech in some of those arenas is accepted as perfectly natural without any thought of the First Amendment.

In September 2017, the University of California at Berkeley, home of the 1960s Free Speech Movement, was slated to host a "Free Speech Week," featuring the alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

A Berkeley chalk artist perfectly articulated the sentiments of the free-speech opponents when he wrote, without irony, "Free Speech Kills." I am moved to agree that free speech does indeed kill, but in a very different manner from what its opponents have in mind: it kills stupidity, sloth, corruption, small-mindedness, pride, overconfidence, and self-righteousness.

There are always two great questions to be asked in moments of crisis: Who is to blame and what is to be done? We have now seen how many hands are soiled with blame for the present crisis of free speech.

https://www.city-journal.org/free-speech-crisis

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