Notes on Free Speech

It's difficult to think of a golden era for free-speech in the world. This is puzzling when one considers how much of the rhetoric on the topic invokes an oncoming dystopia in which we lose our precious freedoms. Whether we are discussing the increase of government power to disrupt public protest or criticising rise of the social justice left and their programme of no plat-forming, both narratives subtly imply that there was a time when anyone was free to say anything and not face any consequences ever.

Of course, the "anyone free to say anything and not face any consequences ever" bit is somewhat farcical: which is probably why no one really defends it when pressed on it. As it stands, you have a right to say what you want but others do not have an obligation to offer you material support or withhold criticism from you and your works. Typically the philosophical framework that supports such an argument rests on a dichotomous public/private conception of society: freedom of speech is seen as a civil "public" right, an agreement between you and the government, not a private obligation between particular individuals or their institutions.

Regardless, it seems difficult to find any period of time where contentious artists didn't face attempts to ban or boycott their work and where protests were roundly tolerated with no foul play on the part of the police.  In light of the history of censorship it's important to view free-speech as a struggle, an ongoing questioning and drawing of boundaries, rather than a concrete liberty.  Free speech isn't a magical place that exists in the past and while we may be tempted to view it as a possible utopian destination for our future, this is a similarly questionable conception. The bulwarks against total freedom of expression - the right to say anything anywhere to anyone anytime and never face any consequences for it ever - are often far too reasonable or ingrained into the human psyche as to be banished conclusively.

To clarify, here are what I consider to be two core reasons for defending free speech:

Firstly it is, in a very basic way, central to any notion of ethical individualism or moral conscience. It's also methodologically encouraged by our need to have a full variety of conclusions available to us in order to the deliberate effectively. These two elements dictate how one normatively evaluates today's issues.

As noted earlier there is a sound philosophical argument for withdrawing support and denying a platform to positions or voices you disagree with. Of course this philosophical argument is nestled within the assumptions of classical liberal thought - and like many aspects of classical liberalism is somewhat short-sighted. While not engaging with or providing resources to one's opponents is not a direct interference with their freedom of speech, the methodological/epistemological reasons for promoting free-speech are forgotten here.  When a person or movement is no plat-formed the wider public and both sides of the debate are deprived of valuable dialogue.

 This argument - that freedom of speech includes dialogue not just expression - would seem to condemn the no-platform tactic out of the box.  This is not necessarily so. There are a plurality of valid and serious factors in need of considering when hosting any sort of contentious debate. In particular when one is hosting a debate where ideas that you find to be morally abhorrent are being expressed. 

A host must seriously consider whether the debate will make people feel threatened or perhaps provide unwanted publicity for a dangerous movement or idea. The simple truth is that not all debates are worth having: not even from a specific political perspective but from a simple concern for the well-being of others. For instance, there is plenty of room to debate the merits of various vaccination programmes and there is some duty to provide room for all sides of the argument but when the anti-vaccination movement raises its voice it is generally innocent children who suffer as a consequence of people buying into their rhetoric.

Outside of handing a megaphone to morally abhorrent or damaging opinions one must also consider whether there is really a debate to be had. Are physicists obligated, by the values of free-speech, to debate psychics? At what point does a crank perspective of reality or politics begin to warrant debating in the public arena?

We have never had un-interrupted freedom of speech and, so long as we are forced to take a pluralistic approach to evaluating the merits of a debate, we never will. The fundamental dynamics of censorship are still intact and it doesn't look like they will go away. So long as we recognise that there are cases in which debate is un-necessary or potentially harmful, a case by case approach is unfortuntely required. There will most definitely be cases in which the spirit of such an evaluation is perverted: cases where the debate or object of concern is warranted, benign but blocked due to an irrational fear that previous political and philosophical commitments might be shattered.

This may seem somewhat defeatist but we have to remember that the "say anything, anytime" alternative is a poor substitute. The values of free-speech can only be realistically sustained as part of a culture that can patiently take calculated risks and deal with the other ethical concerns that arise in the process of mediating a diverse culture. 



*Not least because a world in which a person's words can never be held against them would be severly dysfunctional to say the least.  

Brief Thoughts: Rousseau's Social Contract.

Rousseau's shadow history is that of an unwitting proto-apologist for 20th century authoritarianism. Considering this, how much of his work is salvageable from an anti-authoritarian standpoint?

To be clear, his idealism is frighteningly Orwellian. Most worrying is his concept of the sovereign will: a justification for a perfectly paternalistic government that enforces laws in the knowledge that, despite any individual protests, it really has everyone's interests at heart. The abstract notion of a perfect righteous governtment is itself not so troubling, more-so the fact that Rousseau thinks that such an institution is worth attempting to emulate in an imperfect concrete world. A quote by Vaclav Havel springs to mind:


"[There is] a direct and logical progression from beautiful utopias to concentration camps... [which are] ...but an attempt of utopians to dispose of those elements which do not fit into their utopias" - Havel quoted in John P. Clark's "The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism" p. 131.

However, to view The Social Contract from this angle alone neglects the other points in his work where Rousseau acts as a pre-configuration of later left libertarian ideas.

For all its naivety, the book contains a number of perspicacious observations which still prevail in contemporary political thought. For instance, the noted distinction between socially constructed civil liberty and the baser, more solipsistic, "natural liberty". This distinction, which is nonetheless considered by its detractors a pernicious one that foists too much work on the shoulders of liberty resulting only in perversion, has had an explicit influence on the work of participatory democrats and finds many other parallels in anarchist thought.  

Other notable themes of contemporary interest are Rousseau's delineations of  the economic and political conditions necessary for wide-spread direct democracy and his post-classical interpretation of democratic subjects. Radical egalitarians, especially those with a love of democratic institutions, have often been quick to emphasise the incompatibility of inequality of wealth with harmonious and stable democratic arrangements. This is true for both for participatory democrats and for anarchists: though anarchists don't often argue for the harmony of egalitarianism via an explicitly democratic teleology. 

The "post-classical democratic subject", typically a response invoked to explain humans who are ambivalent to increases in their own access to democracy and liberty, is present and considered here:

"Aristotle was right; but he mistook the effect for the cause. Anyone born in slavery is born for slavery - nothing is more certain. Slaves in their bondage, lose everything, even the desire to be free." Rousseau, The Social Contract p.51-52

And a call for a revision of the classical political subject, which Rousseau's analysis is an early answer to, is found in Saul Newman's "The Politics of Post-Anarchism":

The crucial question raised by Deleuze and Guattari - "how can desire desire its own repression...?" - confronts all radical politics with a central ambiguity. The classical anarchists were not unaware of this problem; indeed, Kropotkin attributes the rise of the modern state in part to people becoming "enamoured of authority" and to their self-enslavement to increasingly centralised systems of law and punishment. However, this problem, while acknowledged, was not sufficiently addressed or theorised in anarchism. Yet it creates certain obvious difficulties for anti-authoritarian politics, unsettling the notion of the moral and rational agent who revolts against an immoral and irrational power.  - Saul Newman in "The Politics of Post-Anarchism" p.60 

So despite their notoriety Rousseau's ideas still have some currency: or at least there are ideas in his political philosophy that are not so offensive that anti-authoritarians discard them out of hand. That said, how do we separate the libratory Rousseau from the tyrannical Rousseau? Where does the problem lie, precisely?

The primary culprit would seem to be his uncritical endorsement of majoratarianism vindicated through his abstract soveriegn will. Rousseau's trust in the sovereign will excludes the possibility of it being usurped by interest groups or becoming exploitative of persistent minorities. Perhaps possibilities of abstention and conscientious objection, along with a greater cynicism towards majoritarianism and the power structures of the state, could render him more palatable?

Indeed modern liberatory writers who adopt his ideas are often markedly unanimous in their avoidance of the problematic concept of sovereign will, even while borrowing from the rest of his political canon. It seems while Rousseau's rhetoric is in places an unfortunate overture to the brutal regimes of the last century, many anti-authoritarians still owe him a philosophical debt. 

White Guilt and Middle Class Angst

Freudian explanations can be quite cheap, and in politics one has to be careful that psycho-analysis doesn't become ad hominem in analyst's garb. That being said there are two particular trends in political rhetoric that I think deserve an emotional probing, if only because a rational one would be fruitless. As the title suggests, I refer to the political right's obsession with accusing opponents of "white/colonial/national guilt" and the political left's passive-aggression directed at its own middle-class members.

Within British politics there are a certain contingent of pundits and campaigners who have a somewhat revisionist opinion of British colonialism. Naturally attempts by the left to dispute claims that British colonialism had the broad global interest at heart or improved the lot of the developing world are chalked up to "colonial guilt". The idea being that the left are possessed of a self-hatred motivating them to give undue credence to claims of atrocity committed by their forebears.

This kind of accusation is curiously silly when you unpack it. The left's traditional stance on nationalism can be summed up by a quote from the, not very left wing, comedian Doug Stanhope:

"Nationalism does nothing but teach you to hate people you've never met and take pride in accomplishments you had no part in".

Considering similar movements in Japan, Germany and other nations, I think we can add an extra symptom to our diagnosis of nationalism:


"Nationalism does nothing but teach you to hate people you've never met, take pride in accomplishments you had no part in and acquire guilt-complex's over atrocities you didn't commit."


Being ashamed of your nation or your race only makes sense if you have already adopted a framework within which your identity and self-worth are already tied to your nationality or race. The left wing perspective is as incapable of national shame as it is of national triumph. Sure there are the occasional melodramatic fools who engage in performative self-flagellation but these are generally cries for attention rather than a sincere apology for atrocity. While the left may have its own biases, derived from their combatitive struggle with the right, such biases do not, and cannot, stem from an affective attitude which the left considers to be irrational tout court.

The accusation of self-hatred via colonial guilt only makes sense from an inherently right-wing perspective. The right-winger perceives the left wing argument as an argument in favour of self-hatred precisely because accepting left wing accounts of history while observing a right-wing social ontology would necessitate self-hatred. All across the globe there are people who insist that belonging to their particular nation gives reason for celebration and these people can often provide vague historical justifications for such an outlook. More worryingly, within the nations that have historically been host to notable human rights abuses there are nearly always a small, but relatively vocal, group arguing that such histories are the product of self-hatred which Japan/Germany/Britain needs to move past.

It is only when you are ambivalent to your national identity that you can view its short-comings without succumbing to guilt. Conversely if you have already committed yourself to the notion that you are "Proud to be...." then your nations past failings are considerably more threatening leading to a desire to deny, minimise and blot them out.

So moving from something that the left doesn't feel guilty about to something it does, let's discuss the role of students and the middle-class in left wing politics.

   

 The term petite bourgeoisie is a common putdown in left wing rhetoric: it denigrates things/people/practises which are counter-revolutionary in part because of their affluent origins. This concept makes some intuitive sense. The language of the left, bar the liberal middle, is the language of class warfare and for justice to prevail the working class must triumph over their oppressors - this necessitates a similar rejection of the logic of the ruling class. There are some other elements of identity politics at play here and also a desire to be seen as authentically representing "the working people" but the overall aim is clear.

Yet this aim is frustrated by the fact that left wing movements are not necessarily always endorsed by the working class: if they were then capitalism would have ended a long time ago. Indeed there are, not just in contemporary life, many cases in which instigators, writers and participants in left wing struggle were of petite bourgeois origin (Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, William Morris, Emma Goldman).


This is not necessarily surprising. Middle class people, and students especially, tend to be more educated and well-read; consequently they are far more likely to have come across books and people who discuss Marxism/Anarchism/Liberalism at a volume and in a tone other than "screaming". There's also the logistical barrier in terms of protest; participation in left wing politics often involves a good deal of sign waving, civil disobedience and risk of arrest. If you are a relatively un-skilled labourer, as opposed to a relatively affluent university student, then spending a day in a jail cell may be quite prohibitive: missing some of your lectures is one thing, missing your shift at work can be another. The result is left-wing activity being disproportionately accessible to those who have yet to acquire any "real world" commitments.

Considering this, is it really so surprising that many of our revolutionaries come from a section of society who have been given the time and opportunity needed to develop left wing beliefs?

All of this must be quite painful to read for those on the left who imagine themselves as part of an uprising working class rather than an expression of petit bourgeois idealism. That's not to say that left-wingness is middle-class by definition: merely that so far as it is a break from the status quo leftism will find a cultural van-guard in the sections of society with better access to education.

But angst about this is un-warranted and rhetoric that refers to purging the left of middle-class hipsters is wasted breathe. It is only expected that the radicals in a society like ours will come from backgrounds where radicalism and creativity are more easily acted upon. An acknowledgment of this is perfectly compatible with working to untangle access to left-wing politics from the bohemian lifestyle but it does require dropping the rhetoric of "leftism as working class populism."

Resolutions for 2016.

A basic principle of military strategy with plenty of civilian applications: No plan survives contact with the enemy. Incomes, relationships and personal interests all change; accordingly it behoves one to construct their New Year Resolutions with adaptability in mind. It is for this reason that this year's edicts will, like last years, be free of measurable goals and progress plans. Sure, such things are beneficial to achieving short term success but over the course of something as unpredictable as a year they're more likely to turn out to be just frustrating and restrictive.

The second stratagem I will be implementing was first iterated to me by one of my undergraduate philosophy lecturers: Do Less, Achieve More. I possess a habit of developing amateur interests in an ever expanding range of activities. I find this habit to be both practically inconvenient and terribly rewarding. It's a trait that I'm quite proud of: one of the few figures of history who I consider to be a role model is the designer William Morris (a pioneer of the Arts and Crafts movement and also an avid dabbler). Despite sharing his appetite for using a wide variety of mediums, I need to give my work some focus. In light of this my New Year's Resolutions will be matched with an inverse of 3 New Year Executions.  Happy 2016!

New Year's Resolutions for 2016.

1.  Reading, Writing and Running.

Last year I successfully expanded the range of written work that I consume and diversified my musical palate. My fitness goals however were not met with similar success and my writing sessions were also largely sporadic - I only really wrote when I needed to meet a deadline that I had set myself. This resolution is a promise to integrate writing, both non and fiction, and running, or exercise in general, into an "almost-daily" routine. The plan is to focus on sustainable long-term regularity rather than intensity or productivity.      

2. Get Techie.

Our world is mediated by computers and understanding them confers not only practical advantages, in terms of cyber security and gadget proficiency, but also in understanding the quintessentially modern philosophical problems of digital space. I want to know how my computer, the internet and my smart phone work and I want to be able to take better advantage of them. I also want to learn some basic coding skills by December; maybe C#.

3.  Get Foodie.

In the last six months I have discovered a pretty intense love of food and drink and have begun developing skills to match this interest. This resolution is simply a proof of intent to continue this trend through 2016. Health and general utility abound!

The 2016 Temporary Hit-list.   

1. Video Games.

 The thought came to me recently that I'm more in love with the idea of video games than I am with games themselves. There are a handful of titles that I love in theory and in execution but most of the games I enjoy, I enjoy primarily for the sake of the concept. Likewise the idea of a digital interactive space as a communicative platform is really exciting but most video games tend to disappoint my expectations of them as far as "art" is concerned. I'll keep playing Minecraft and perhaps dip my toe here or there but for now I'm content to give up trying to finish the classics or look out for cool new titles.

2. Video Editing and Production.
I have a youtube channel where I upload things related to video games. It's mainly an exercise in video editing and presentation and has been a fun side project. Regardless, video editing is time consuming and I have better things to focus on.

3.  The Misc Clause.

No wood-work, painting, electronics, amateur engineering etc: this is a general resolution to not pick  up any new hobbies, at least until my other resolutions succeed. It refers both to hobbies I have outside of the now sanctioned cooking, writing, reading and running quartet and also pre-emptively excludes any new hobbies from my life for the foreseeable future.    

Ramblings: Philosophy, Methodology and Certainty.

It was the promise of accuracy that drew me to philosophy. The promise of being able to look into something as messy as an argument and identify clear winners and losers. Ironically it was a scientist, not a philosopher, who got me hooked.  I remember reading the God Delusion as a teen and being floored by Richard Dawkins as he reasoned his way to concrete conclusions on abstract topics like God and morality. For a long time this was what I thought philosophy actually delivered: a systematic grilling of suppositions that removed fuzziness from elusive subjects via cold logical necessity.

 

Of course neither philosophy nor logic operate in the way my young self envisioned them. Noting that the premises "A" and "A therefore B" provide you with the conclusion "B" is all very well, but working in real time to demonstrate the soundness of even a simple modus ponens can be difficult. The problem stems from different people's propensity to entertain selected premises with varying levels of enthusiasm. Not only that but people, philosophers especially, often end up arguing about the appropriateness of various linguistic conventions within which a premise might be expressed.  

This observation is mildly troubling to anyone of a similar disposition to my younger quasi-neo-positivist self. If arguments are to be disputed effectively in a dialogue of pure logic then the participants need to share the appropriate premises. The sheer extent to which philosophers fail to share premises, including fundamental ones like those governing concept identity, somewhat undercuts the idea that philosophy is an activity of just applying logic and coming to a conclusion.

It is important to note however that this isn't a problem for the broader application of logic within philosophy. Instead it is a problem for notions of philosophical truth attempting to approximate "certain truth". Cartesian demons aside, there is a distinction between scientific truth and philosophical truth. While the outer rims of scientific inquiry are uncertain places science does provide us with facts like "water at sea level boils when it hits 100 degrees Celsius"; these are things that philosophy doesn't provide. Even the most instrumental of fields, applied ethics, rarely confronts us with anything like a philosophical consensus out of which could emerge a "fact".

This wide zone of disagreement is a product of philosophical arguments being dependent on premises which are themselves nestled into wider networks of related philosophical arguments which in turn are nestled in even wider networks... ad infinitum... Or maybe not quite ad infinitum, but these chains are long enough and often so complex that tracing them may as well be an infinite endeavour. So, where does this leave philosophers?

Well, assuming that we don't have time to sit debating the truthfulness of every connected premise in a given argument then we will just have to assume certain premises. Of course which premises we question and which we accept are determined by our aforementioned predilections. Furthermore while the arena of debate often acts as an aid forcing us to defend premises that we would otherwise assume to be true, it's efficacy is limited: opponents in a debate only point us towards premises that they would question, not necessarily the premises we should question. 

In light of this I don't think we can position philosophy as the provider of linearly accrued capital K "Knowledge". Philosophers cannot snatch certainty from the jaws of the abstract. Yet maybe they can offer something that is more contingent and perhaps just as illuminating. Philosophical debates rarely end, but they are often developed and deepened. A more realistic goal for philosophy may just be to properly delineate the gaps in our knowledge and provide a selection of placeholders in lieu of definite answers.