How can, and should, we talk to each other, especially to people with whom we disagree? “Free speech” is rightfully entrenched as an important value in liberal democratic societies, but implementing it consistently and fairly is a tricky business. Political theorist Teresa Bejan comes to this question from a philosophical and historical perspective, managing to relate broad principles to modern hot-button issues. We talk about the importance of tolerating disreputable beliefs, the senses in which speech acts can be harmful, and how “civility” places demands on listeners as well as speakers.
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Teresa Bejan received an M.Phil. in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale. She is currently Associate Professor of Political Theory and Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford. Among her awards are the American Political Science Association’s Leo Strauss Award for the best dissertation in political philosophy and the inaugural Early Career Prize for the greatest overall contribution to research and teaching in political thought from the Britain & Ireland Association for Political Thought. Her book Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration considers political speech through the lens of early modern debates about religious liberty.
- Web site
- Oxford web page
- Mere Civility
- Google Scholar publications
- Wikipedia
- Talk on “What Was the Point of Equality?”
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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And these days, I’ve become increasingly interested in the idea of democracy. Democracy, we all know it, most of us are in favor of it. If you took a poll, most people would say that democracy is a good idea, many people would say that it’s under threat. There are people who are working to undermine democracy, people might not agree on who those people are, okay? Here at Mindscape, we’re less interested in the political moment of our contemporary time and more interested in the underlying ideas that are used to justify and to push forward or to pull back on an idea like democracy. What is democracy? How does it work? How should it work? Why is it such a good idea? Is it always such a good idea? These are the kinds of things that I’m interested in thinking about.
0:00:50 SC: So today we’re going to be talking about an aspect of democracy or an idea that is very closely intertwined with the idea of democracy, which is the idea of free speech. Again, if you ask most people, they would say, “Yes, free speech, I’m in favor of that.” It’s when the rubber hits the road, and when you’re getting into individual specific examples that it becomes harder, and actually, I think it should become harder. This is one of the things that I would personally want to emphasize here is that the way to go wrong talking and thinking about free speech is to pretend that it’s easy, to pretend that it’s absolute and there’s a clearly right way to think about it and a clearly wrong way to think about it. Think about the following two extreme examples, extreme versions of free speech, even if you admit that free speech is good, what do you mean by that?
0:01:36 SC: So one version might be, everyone has the freedom to say whatever they want, but literally nobody else will ever hear them. So that’s a kind of free speech, you can say whatever you want, right, but if nobody hears you, what is the point? That’s really not quite maybe enough. Whereas on the other side, you might say, “Okay, to me, free speech means not only can you say whatever you want, but everyone has to hear what you say, and then worse than that, everyone has to agree with me.” [chuckle] That’s a very extreme form of free speech that probably also nobody would go along with, and what we want is somewhere in the middle, but where in the middle? And both of these examples drive home the importance of not only thinking about the person speaking but of the audience, the people being spoken to.
0:02:24 SC: And that’s why I really like the kind of analysis provided by today’s guest, Teresa Bejan, who is a political theorist at the University of Oxford in the UK, and someone who’s thought deeply about free speech, also in a historical context, not only as a political theorist. So what she points out is that the traditional… If you go all the way back to ancient Athens, there were different Greek words corresponding to different notions of free speech. There was a notion of isegoria, which is the right of citizens to participate in public debate, which was much more public-facing than this different notion of parrhesia, which was a license to say what you please, to be frank, to speak your mind, to be politically incorrect, if you want to put it that way. And we translate both of these the same way, which leads us to confusion sometimes when we think about what free speech should be.
0:03:15 SC: And then she traces it through history and points out the importance in the United States, especially that very interesting case of the early founding of Rhode Island, which was, as she points out, one of the most open, tolerant societies in the world at the time, on the importance of civility in the sense of I should listen to you, not civility in the sense that when I say bad things about you, I should say them in polite terms, but I actually have an obligation as a listener to listen to you, and that’s a really high bar when it comes to free speech. So we’re not going to answer once and for all in any clear-cut way that everyone will agree with all of the questions you might raise about free speech, but I think that listening to this podcast, listening to Teresa’s explanations of these issues gives us a richer feeling for how we should think about these issues, ’cause they’re important issues. It’s not enough just to say yes, democracy, free speech, good. We have to be both clear on what we mean, and we have to be able to defend why our particular point of view is the right way to think about these very, very contentious issues, So with that, let’s go.
[music]
0:04:40 SC: Teresa Bejan, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:04:41 Teresa Bejan: Thanks for having me.
0:04:42 SC: I need to start with a sort of ironic observation here, because on the one hand, you have pointed out things like the importance when it comes to free speech of not only letting people talk but also listening to them, right? Actually taking into account what they’re saying with some kind of an open mind, but at the same time, in our modern world, the phrase “free speech” has kind of become a flash point and a little marker for where you land in certain culture war disputes. So I’m sure that a lot of listeners when they tune in to this podcast are going to be first thinking like, “What side is she on? Is she on the right one or the wrong one?” And then listen to you or discard you on the basis of that without listening very carefully. Have you come across this phenomenon?
0:05:28 TB: Absolutely, and indeed, that phenomenon is one of the reasons why I’m so interested in free speech debates today, but also about some of the other things we’ll talk about, civility and equality. I think that discussions both in the academy and in the public sphere about all of these topics are becoming increasingly politicized. And so maybe my driving reason for being at this point is trying to say that no, we can talk about them in a way that doesn’t just reduce to determining which side am I on and is it the right one.
0:06:03 SC: Alright, well, now that we know what side you’re on, people who can decide whether… [chuckle] That they should listen.
0:06:08 TB: Well, it’s funny, with the free speech issue, you’re absolutely right that it has become politicized and that, and particularly in the present debate, there’s this sense that, okay, well, free speech as a principle is being weaponized or is being colonized by the right, and therefore when someone is pleading for the importance of free speech, that’s a sort of dog whistle that they’re sort of coming from the right-wing, but it’s just worth noticing just how… It’s a kind of polar reversal from how things have been in recent history in the United States, where free speech was really the ideal of the left. The whole free speech movement got its start at Berkeley, the idea that suddenly, it’s the right wing that cares about free speech is pretty historically curious.
0:06:58 TB: So, another thing that I think is important is to take a sufficiently long view that we can, at least for our own minds, just to see that there’s no natural connection between these principles on one or other side of the political spectrum, that there is a kind of contingency here, and we should be able to think about what these ideals mean and what they look like in practice, apart from their kind of contingent politicization in the present moment.
0:07:28 SC: The other thing that… Speaking of which, I suppose I should say, in reading some of your stuff, I was really struck by the connection between free speech and democracy. I guess obviously we think of democracy as something that goes hand-in-hand with free speech, but it seems there was a more fundamental underlying commonality of idea there, that the idea that people have the right to self-govern is inextricably wound up with the idea that people have a voice and the right to talk. Is that a correct interpolation or am I just seeing things there?
0:08:03 TB: That’s right. And it’s something that’s very much on my mind. Today, we’re very concerned with this idea of voice and finding a voice, making it possible for those who’ve been traditionally excluded to have a voice, and that kind of concern, I think, is really ancient and connected with this intuition that democratic government is the regime that most… Is best at ensuring a voice to all those governed. And so, thinking about democracy as a matter, not just of voting, which is… That tends to be the limited sense in which we think of a public voice today, is that I have a voice insofar as I’m able to vote for my representative, but also thinking of democracy as about talk and having a say in just the more quotidian way of just being able to get my voice heard.
0:09:05 SC: Yeah, it immediately… I guess what struck me about it was how it pre-figures this idea that speech is a form of power, that speech is not just something that floats out there in the air, separate from the levers of power in our society, that who speaks, who gets listened to, etcetera, is part of that complex.
0:09:27 TB: Absolutely. It’s funny, a lot of times in talking about free speech, and especially for those coming from the more kind of civil libertarian side, who are really committed to individual rights of free speech, often those, free speech fundamentalists, if you will, are accused of being indifferent to power, but I think that misses the mark. I think that civil libertarians are really sensitive to power dynamics and the power of voice, and are worried about granting a kind of arbitrary power to the powers that happen to be, to decide who speaks and who doesn’t. So I think that the original democratic sense of the importance and power of voice is connected. If we just look at ancient Greek democracy, democracy in Greek, it just comes from the idea of “demos kratos,” so people power.
0:10:24 TB: So in a democracy, it’s the demos that is empowered to speak, it’s the people, and then you can look at different institutional arrangements that try to make that, try to make it possible for the people to speak. But I think that for all democracies, ancient and modern, that’s what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to find a way of allowing the people to speak in a way that is as equal as possible to sort of distribute that power equally.
0:10:53 SC: I guess the thing that is constantly going on in the back of people’s minds when you say it, like what you say makes perfect sense. Probably most people, if you ask them, should you let the people speak, etcetera, they’d be all for that, but everyone has in the back of their minds some particular group that they want to be able to speak and applying that universally is a challenge.
0:11:14 TB: I just don’t think the human mind is really programmed to be able to apply our values universally, that’s a highly controversial thing to say, many of my colleagues in moral and political philosophy will be very annoyed with me for saying it, but I do just think we’re not really built to be able to reason in a principled way all the time, which is why we try to cultivate and build institutions that could kind of relieve some of that pressure. And I think broadly speaking, what we think of as liberal rights, individual rights, are precisely developed in order to sort of alleviate that pressure to sort of save us the trouble of trying to act in a principled way all the time, to do that kind of judging for us.
0:12:02 TB: But you said, you framed it positively, you said we usually have a sense of the group we want particularly to hear, or we think needs a voice. I would actually be inclined to frame it negatively, I think most of the time people are clearest on who or, the individuals or groups they think should not have a voice. And I think pick your bête noire here. I mean, fascists, racists, social justice warriors, the woke, etcetera. We have an idea of the group that needs the volume turned down on them. [chuckle]
0:12:41 SC: Well, but empirically, we don’t talk that way. We don’t go actively… We, broadly speaking. It’s not the accepted thing to say we should shut these people up so much. Sometimes that happens, but the positive case is sort of the more compelling one? No? Or am I making that up?
0:13:01 TB: I think a lot rests on we, there. Sort of who are we? And who are we speaking of? I think you’re right. I think that for the most part, people are… When they are concerned negatively about the groups that they see as a kind of danger to principles of equality or equal liberty and society, they’re concerned in good faith. But I found this in my work on civility as well. I think our brains tend to focus better on the source of threat.
0:13:36 SC: Right, okay. That makes sense.
0:13:37 TB: Rather than a kind of positive ideal, but we can come to that.
0:13:44 SC: You mentioned the ancient Greeks and I didn’t want to zip over them too quickly. I was really fascinated by this distinction that you mentioned between two different kinds of free speech that the Greeks pinpointed. So, why don’t you share that with us?
0:13:57 TB: It’s my dearest wish as an academic to be able to write articles for popular audiences that hinge on making a distinction in ancient Greek. It really seems…
[chuckle]
0:14:12 SC: You’ve come to the right podcast, anyway.
0:14:15 TB: That I have been able to do this. So, in ancient Greek, there’s a distinction between parrhesia on the one hand and isegoria on the other, and these are both ideas and practices associated with democratic Athens in particular. Parrhesia is the idea of free speech in the sense of speaking freely. We might think of a frank speech, speaking frankly, and it’s precisely the idea that you speak your mind without fear or favor whenever, wherever and to whomever you choose. But isegoria is more closely connected with the democratic institutions as they existed in Athens, and it’s an idea of the equal right of citizens to address the public assembly. So partly what interests me is precisely the process by which… What was the clear distinction in ancient Greek and also, I would argue, in later centuries, sort of the reception of the Greek tradition about thinking about freedom and democracy.
0:15:28 TB: That distinction has just been lost in modern English, in modern times. And so, what you’ll find now in a lot of the Greek sources that I use is that where the Greek distinguishes between parrhesia and isegoria, in English, they’re just both translated as free speech, so the distinction is erased in the act of translation. And so, partly what I was trying to do is to recover this distinction and to show that, actually, it helps make sense of some of the more fraught kind of culture war style debates we’re having about free speech today where, actually, there are two different principles at stake and it behooves us to wrap our heads around them.
0:16:11 SC: Is parrhesia supposed to be construed as something more personal or interpersonal somehow? Like I can say things that you might find insulting and I have the right to do that, whereas isegoria is more political, or am I putting things there that don’t belong?
0:16:27 TB: No, I think that’s right. I would make two slight corrections. I think it’s not quite right to discuss parrhesia in terms of a right. What’s really important in this concept and especially in the centuries after classical Athens, is the idea that parrhesia is really seen as a license, as a kind of privilege. And it’s a license granted by the powerful to the weak. I allow you to speak your mind to me.
0:17:00 SC: Okay.
0:17:00 TB: I say, “Well, I will tolerate your free and frank speech.” And this comes into manuals on rhetoric, talking about the figure of licentia or license, the idea that a speaker might claim a license to say something that the audience may not want to hear. I think actually it’s in the modern… And I would say, a sort of post-First Amendment renderings of parrhesia that we get this idea that you could have a right to speak freely and frankly. But you’re absolutely right that isegoria is really closely connected with political institutions and, specifically, democratic institutions. Isegoria is a right that is insured equally to those who belong as members to the demos and then who can then attend and participate in debate in the public forum. It doesn’t really make sense to discuss isegoria outside of or in the absence of those democratic institutions.
0:17:58 SC: So, how does something like the debates over whether hate speech should be allowed or censored or illegal fit into this? Is the side that says, “Well, I should be able to say what I want even if it’s hateful,” is that a appeal to parrhesia?
0:18:15 TB: Yeah. So, I would classify it this way. So, you have sort of modern parrhesiastae, if you will, sort of modern proponents of free and frank speech, arguing a kind of… It was also often described as free speech absolutism, but I actually think that that’s not really an accurate description of you, but what I would call free speech fundamentalism that gives priority always to the right of individuals to speak their minds, no matter how offensive that happens to be to the audience. But then on the other side, you have people who are really, really worried about the ways in which exercises of parrhesia can, not just harm others, but cause a specific kind of harm, which is a kind of dignitary harm.
0:19:06 TB: The idea that hate speech, in this example, is a kind of assault on the equal status or standing of members of racial, gender, ethnic minorities and thus the argument would come back, and so I would say the modern defender of isegoria is more worried about how we secure and maintain this system of kind of equal speakers. And on that view, you might then say, “Well, parrhesia needs to be restricted so that isegoria can be protected.”
0:19:41 SC: Right, okay, yeah. I mean, there’s this famous cartoon that flies around the internet about Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance. Have you seen this?
0:19:51 TB: Oh, yeah, I sure have.
[chuckle]
0:19:53 SC: I’m sure people are going to bring it up, right, so that’s why I’m pre-empting them, but the idea being that you think that you want to be tolerant of everybody, but some people are intrinsically intolerant, and tolerating them can be the death of tolerance, and therefore we should only tolerate some people.
0:20:10 TB: I just, I have to say I’m so pleased you brought it up so that I can… So I can complain about it.
0:20:15 SC: Yeah, please.
[chuckle]
0:20:17 TB: So again, we’ll come to this later in the discussion, ’cause I talk about this directly in my work on civility and tolerance. I think it’s really… It makes a pretty important mistake about what tolerance is and what it means. It’s precisely the putting up with something we acknowledge to be an evil. And in my view, a tolerant society that as a matter of principle doesn’t tolerate the intolerant is not a tolerant society.
[chuckle]
0:20:51 TB: I think we can have arguments about what we might call militant democracy, the idea that in democracies, there should not be any right to organize as an anti-democratic party, so you don’t have a case where the Nazis run on a platform of abolishing parliamentary elections and then are elected, right? So that kind of case. So I think that you can make sense conceptually of militant democracy. I don’t think that militant tolerance actually makes any sense, and I think that the idea is sort of traceable, I mean, forget Popper, you can trace it to Herbert Marcuse and the idea of repressive tolerance, the idea that we have to repress the enemies of tolerance. And I just, I don’t… I know people really enjoy sharing that cartoon, they think it’s a sort of knock-down argument, but I would just sort of beg them to think a little bit more deeply about what that actually means. I think in my book, I talk about a tolerant society cannot pick and choose its materials and remain tolerant for long, and I would just… That’s my view. But I think you’re right, it’s the same idea in debates today about free speech, the idea that some speech needs to be silenced so as to protect the principle of free speech for all or to make the right to free speech equal.
0:22:19 SC: Yeah. We have to get into that, obviously, because that is, it is a tricky one, and drawing the boundaries between speech that should be allowed and speech… I mean, there’s some speech… There’s shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, which is a classic example of something that you’re not allowed to do. So there’s a more general principle there. But again, when I brought up the hate speech example, that’s sort of the free speech sloganeering that goes on on one side, that I should be able to say hateful things as long as you’re not physically harmed, but then there’s the other side, to map it back onto the isegoria-parrhesia distinction. There’s a concern about free speech that says, “Well, look, I have a point of view, and my point of view is just not being represented in the discourse, right? Like certain kinds of ideas are just not mentioned on TV, it’s just not considered respectable, etcetera. So shouldn’t I have a right to be heard in some way?”
0:23:19 TB: I think that way of framing it is exactly right. I think very often what… The sense of righteous indignation that’s fueling a lot of this culture war, and I would say that actually on both sides you have people who feel sincerely and righteously indignant that their views cannot get a hearing. And I have a paper in which I make some of these… Make the argument sort of more technically, but I think the basic thrust is this, I don’t think that you can have an equal enforceable right to be heard. I think that’s a non-starter on the level of society as such. I think that you can have that kind of right to a hearing in well-defined, relatively small-scale deliberatory fora, like the Democratic Assembly in Athens, like a faculty meeting, like the parliamentary chamber or the Senate floor. When you have a well-defined space of debate, you can say, “Okay, everybody gets a hearing.” And so I think that the impulse, though, to say, well, that has to be realized on the scale of society as such in order for free speech to be sort of meaningful, I understand the impulse, but I just think that it can’t actually work on the scale of society, and therefore the costs of trying to realize it are unacceptable from the point of view of freedom of speech.
0:25:08 SC: That sounds reasonable to me, but I hear the worry that this makes free speech, let’s put it dramatically, into a tool of oppression, into a tool of maintaining the status quo, because you say, “Well, everyone should able to speak, some people have access to microphones and amplification and some people don’t,” so you’re baking in some kind of inequality from the start.
0:25:37 TB: Yeah, I’m very sensitive to that response, and I think that it’s absolutely right to point out the status quo bias in a lot of pat liberal defenses of individual rights, so I’m not indifferent to power in this case. I suppose that my sense always is, though, in such arguments, you’re effectively calling for the suppression and exclusion of hateful or denigrating views. And it’s just… Who are you proposing to have that power to censor, and it’s always going to be the powers-that-be, and there’s this faith, it’s a very strange faith, on the one hand that our governors are incompetent, evil, etcetera, but on the other hand, that we should empower them even further to suppress views they don’t like.
0:26:32 TB: And so, I guess that is why if your listeners are trying to work out what side I’m on, it’s the small-c small-l civil libertarian side that simply says, look, absolutely free… The principle of free speech can be weaponized by those who want to just cling very, very tightly to their right to insult other people on the basis of ascriptive characteristics, but yes, that can and does happen, but that itself doesn’t disqualify or somehow render invalid the importance of free speech, and that in itself is not an argument for why a system wherein we don’t value parrhesia at all, would be better from the perspective of the things we claim to care about, namely equality and the rest.
0:27:29 TB: I think that there’s good historical evidence to then say, well, we should be skeptical of the idea that an alternative system would actually be better for the marginalized, but I agree with you. It’s an important worry, and I worry it’s… In my concern is that it’s a worry that’s not necessarily taken seriously by a lot of those who identify as being on the kind of civil libertarian side of the disagreement.
0:27:52 SC: Yeah, no, I take it as my role as the podcast host to try to bring up the imaginary opponents of these things, but I’m essentially on your side here, I think that…
0:28:02 TB: Oh, no, I’ve gotta change my mind now because this is what I worry about, will people agree with me?
0:28:08 SC: You didn’t know which side I was on, I tricked you. No, I think that there’s a very sensible argument to be made that, sure, if you say on the one hand, everyone has the right to talk, and on the other hand, some people have microphones and some don’t, that’s an unequal balance there, but nevertheless, we have to maintain that kind of equality of right to talk, because eventually, that will be a tool for the people who don’t have power. If you take that away from them, then what is the hope?
0:28:35 TB: Yeah, I would again, and this is… I am a political theorist and a political philosopher, but I really do come to it from the history of political thought and just thinking about these political questions historically and the defenders of the right to censor, suppress and exclude are often themselves part of or see themselves as allies of the establishment. And I guess one of the interesting things in debates today is that we’re in this cultural moment where there are kind of conflicting establishments. We might think of the intellectual academia and media establishment as being ranged against the political establishment, to take the American case, and I think that that maps well onto the British case as well.
0:29:26 TB: And that’s a kind of unique historical moment, but I don’t think it’s desirable for those establishments, for those rival establishments and their partisans to begin just duking it out as a kind of power conflict, opposed from the idea that there are principles that should bind how we conduct our disagreements, and one of those principles being the principle of free speech. In the UK now, we have this bizarre situation where the government is now sort of wanting to impose free speech “on the universities.”
[laughter]
0:30:06 TB: And I just… For again, for someone broadly civil libertarian, to me, that’s not a desirable outcome.
0:30:13 SC: It’s very similar, we have the same thing in the US, it is… But I love your idea of the conflicting establishments, because it’s very real, and it’s a wonderful thing because everyone can think of themselves as an oppressed minority, right? Because there’s some other establishment that doesn’t agree with them.
0:30:28 TB: Absolutely. And again, my other dearest wish, since I’m just sharing my dearest wishes with you, Sean, my other dearest wish is that people can just take seriously the feeling of righteous indignation on all sides, not grant that all indications are equally righteous, but grant that everyone experiences their indignation equally righteously. ‘Cause I do very often think… What we really need to resist is this polarization of every question of principle into, “Are you or are you not on the right side?” And again, I think just approaching these questions from the perspective of, say, the 17th century, and debates about religious toleration is really good training for identifying and resisting the sectarian impulse, which I do think is just endemic in human psychology and human community.
0:31:23 TB: We like to believe and belong on the basis of our shared beliefs, and that’s a kind of feature and bug of how human beings work, and so what we should be doing, I think, is… When I say we, I mean people like me who are lucky enough to be in the academy, lucky enough to be educators, is sort of helping our students cultivate the virtues that allow them to resist that pull.
0:31:47 SC: Yeah. Yeah, okay, good. And I do like the fact that you come at this from a historical angle. I definitely want to get much more into the history of Rhode Island than we’ve ever gotten into before, here on Mindscape, but maybe this is the good place, since we’re already into the conversation, I don’t think that I’ve let you, given you the opportunity to sort of, in your eyes, what is the best justification for free speech? What is the argument? It’s become such a cliche in the US, in the UK, of course, we’re pro-free speech, largely construed, but… Or broadly construed. But there are different possible justifications you could offer for that. And they might not be the same, they might not be equally appropriate. Do you have a favorite reason why we should be small-c, small-l, civil libertarians in this sense?
0:32:35 TB: It’s a great question, and it’s one I managed not to confront for quite a long time. I knew that, as anyone who’s ever been a graduate student knows, you spend most of your time deciding who annoys you and whom you disagree with before you’re in the business of proffering your own positive argument for anything you care about.
0:32:53 SC: That doesn’t go away when you’re a much more senior faculty member, but…
[chuckle]
0:32:57 TB: Yeah. Definitely true. But I knew that I didn’t find the kind of Millian case, John Stuart Millian case for free speech persuasive, the idea that free speech is justified as a means to truth production. And so I’ve been much more drawn to historical justifications of free speech that emphasize the sanctity of individual conscience. So the idea is that all human beings have minds, we have no choice but to make up our minds for ourselves, although we try to free ourselves of that responsibility as much as possible, and that a system of free speech is the one wherein we respect the fact that people equally have minds.
0:33:47 TB: And I think one way of thinking about it, especially in this kind of… In the case of current debates, is that we’re very concerned about the ways in which certain voices can’t be heard on the basis of their identity. So we’re familiar with the ways in which women’s voices are discounted, racial minorities’ voices are discounted, now increasingly gender non-conforming identities are discounted. But what I always come back to is identities don’t speak, individuals do. My ascriptive characteristics don’t determine what I’m going to think or say on any given issue. And so any sort of political, legal, social system surrounding speech, I think, has to attend to and credit that fact. And a society that values that or respects that individual conscience, for me, is one in which I’d much prefer to live.
0:34:47 TB: And then again, we get to the negative case, which is that because in societies that don’t, we empower the powers that happen to be to censor on our behalf. But in that kind of case for free speech, that’s much closer to the case that someone like John Milton would make in something, in the 1640s than it is to the case that John Stuart Mill would make in the 1840s. That case is an older case, and in the 17th century was an explicitly Christian case, it was about the power of the Word, it was about the importance of conscience. But I think it’s a lot more persuasive or more accurately or effectively captures the kinds of things I care about than do some of the more safely secular arguments. [chuckle]
0:35:39 SC: Well, it sounds… Maybe my understanding of history or philosophy is imperfect, I know it is. But it sounds like a Kantian conception rather than a more Humean conception? I mean, giving some… Giving priority to the autonomy of individuals rather than just a more, “Let’s try everything and see what works” kind of thing.
0:36:01 TB: I think that’s fair. Again, I’m just… I’m sort of set in my contrarian ways, and I really don’t like autonomy.
0:36:12 SC: Oh, okay, you don’t like autonomy. I read that in to what you were saying.
0:36:18 TB: Perhaps I should be clearer. I don’t think that… I don’t believe that persons are autonomous in the way that Kant describes them. I don’t think they are. I don’t think they can be autonomous in the way that Kant describes them in that it’s not the power… So for Kant, the justification for the, as he would have put it, the public use of one’s reason, is that we need the freedom to reason publicly in order to be rational. And I think that… I see the attraction of that sort of argument, but I don’t actually believe that speech is fundamentally about exchanging reasons. I think speech is about a whole lot more than that. It’s about affect, it’s about enthusiasm, and it’s about everything else. And so the Christian privileging of the Word, if you will, seeing the Word as something that is all powerful and exists apart from the individuals who receive or speak it, actually is closer to my view. But I understand, as I’m saying this, again for your listeners, “What side is she on? She’s beginning to sound very, very Protestant.” And the funny thing is, of course, that I like these religious arguments, but I’m not myself religious.
0:37:42 SC: No, no. I think that’s wonderful, because our culture went through that even for the most secular of us today. The history definitely engaged with that. But I think what you just said was very helpful to me ’cause now I’m seeing more of the distinction you’re trying to draw. I mean, Mill and his later avatars, I guess like Habermas would count, had this idea of reasoning and talking to each other and sharing ideas, and that’s why we couldn’t declare certain ideas out of bounds, because then we might miss some good ones and we’re handicapping ourselves in the search for the truth.
0:38:21 SC: Whereas you’re much more concerned about, it sounds like… Let me phrase it and then you can correct me, it sounds like you’re more concerned about just the idea that people should have the right to spout off and say what they want because they’re individuals. And even if what they say is nonsense and it doesn’t help us find the truth, they still would have the right to say it.
0:38:43 TB: Nonsense peddlers are people too…
0:38:44 SC: Yeah, exactly.
0:38:46 TB: Is my view. The intolerant are people too, hypocrites are people too, and the point is that people are people. And people very often suck, but it’s empirical people who have rights. Yeah, no, I think that’s a helpful way of putting it. And here again, I just think a historical perspective is crucial. If we’re interested in where our, quote unquote, “our modern institutions,” our modern commitments come from, there is a really important kind of divergence between the way in which free speech principles and institutions developed in the United States, in what would become the United States, so in North America, and how they develop in Europe. In the European tradition, as you say, we might say, accommodating Habermas, the European arguments are much more focused on speech as a vehicle for reason and argument. And you see this reflected, actually, in the language in which the demand is expressed. So if we think about Spinoza, he’s talking about the freedom to philosophize.
0:39:46 TB: Kant himself is talking again about the right to exercise one’s reason in public. Mill talks about the liberty of thought and discussion. So it’s never about free speech as such. It’s always about this category of reasoned speech. And so there’s quite a lot of exclusion of a lot of speech built into that. Whereas, in the American case, it’s not philosophers who are worried about this and sort of building up institutions, except maybe for Thomas Jefferson. It’s a bunch of evangelical Christians, a lot of self-styled prophets, and so what they’re worried about is how to build an institutional system that protects the right to spread the Word, sort of the freedom to proselytize as opposed to the freedom to philosophize. And I do think that this accounts, not fully, but to a large extent, to the very different cultures around freedom of speech and the greater tolerance for not only pornography but prophecy that you get in America, as opposed to other liberal democracies.
0:40:55 SC: And you make a wonderful case for thinking more than we usually do in American history about Roger Williams and the case of Rhode Island, and the idea… I mean, he’s a fascinating character, which I’d heard his name before, but reading in your stuff about how committed he was to his ideals, and those ideals led him to create a space where people who he thought were terrible could nevertheless participate.
0:41:22 TB: Yeah. I’m from North Carolina, so we don’t really get taught anything about Rhode Island in the American South, [chuckle] but I did, I just became really fascinated with him when I was in grad school and ended up arguing in my first book that Roger Williams, not only his theory, but actually more importantly his practice of civility and tolerance, was not only a good model for thinking about civility, tolerance and speech in society today, but also historically important in that, that sort of brand of Protestant evangelicalism helps explain American exceptionalism when it comes to freedom of speech, and why our approach to freedom of speech is more parrhesiastic, if you will, than that of other modern democracies.
0:42:17 SC: And in particular, this notion of civility is one that you examine closely. I think that casually a lot of people are going to think we have to be nice to each other and not insult each other, but that’s not what the central point is for you.
0:42:31 TB: No. In my work on civility, which is really I guess where all of this began, I was interested to really work out what distinguishes civility from other conversational virtues. As you say, I think in common parlance we tend to think, “Oh, well, to be civil means to be nice, it means to be respectful, it means to be polite,” but if you think about it for a bit, you… It very quickly appears that that can’t be right, because when we’re talking about civility, we are talking about something that is… Well, I might say it has three distinguishing features that show it to be peculiar and not reducible to those other virtues. The first one is that civility seems to be appropriate to disagreement in particular. So we talk about civility when we’re talking about how we should conduct our disagreements.
0:43:30 TB: Secondly, civility has a kind of minimal character, so we can talk about being merely civil. Civility is what we need to deal with bad neighbors, ex-spouses, members of the other party, and so it has this kind of low but solid kind of sense that other virtues like decorum, politeness, respect don’t. And then thirdly and finally, civility comes from the Latin civilitas, which in turn comes from civitas, which means political society or civil society. And so, civility seems to be a virtue that should pertain to disagreements between those who stand in a particular kind of relation, I.e., the relation of citizen or co-members of a single civil society.
0:44:22 TB: And so it was working through those features of civility that led me to conclude that a lot of the debates going on at the time when I was writing and publishing my book and also now with the kind of culture where free speech debates we’ve been talking about. A lot of the debates that claim to be about free… Those who support free speech versus those who are against free speech are actually debates about different cultures of civility in tolerant societies. So how much uncivil talk or how much insult, how much nastiness can a tolerant society put up with? And so it was in that… It was in trying to reframe debates about speech intolerance in that way, that I then came to single out Roger Williams as offering a particular model about how we might think of civility in a tolerant society as being consistent with quite a lot of free and frank speaking, but nevertheless made it possible for a society of proselytizers to rub along together despite their differences.
0:45:36 SC: Yeah. So civility in this sense is not to be conflated with politeness or decorum, but more… I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but more just a willingness to keep engaging despite the craziness that these people are saying.
0:45:51 TB: Yeah. In the book, I define mere civility as a minimal conformity to culturally contingent norms of respectful behavior. So you’ll see, there is an idea as, we abide by or we conform ourselves to norms of respectful behavior, but not because we actually respect or not because we’re sincerely committed to treating others respectfully. And the distinction is important, because mere civility then becomes a way, not only is it consistent with actually feeling disrespect for others, but it can actually become a way of communicating disrespect or contempt for others. So when I treat you with mere civility, Sean, that could be a way of conveying to you exactly what I think about you and your wrong views.
0:46:42 SC: You could be condescending.
0:46:46 TB: Yeah. As you say. Okay. Well, fair enough. This is a way of distinguishing it from respect but what does it really mean in the clutch? And I think what you’ve singled out is exactly right. Mere civility is this willingness and commitment to engaging with our opponents and to continuing to engage and share a life with those we don’t respect. As I put it in the past and I think this captures it pretty well, is the idea, it reflects our commitment to share a life, even when we don’t share a faith, and to working together to make our society more just, as opposed to viewing our opponents simply as obstacles to the realization of a just society.
0:47:35 SC: So is it safe to say that the idea… We’ll get to how you justify this approach. But the idea is that we should keep acting respectful even in a complete absence of respect?
0:47:48 TB: Yeah. Yeah. That’s definitely one way of putting it. One of the things I was reacting against in turning to civility was what I saw as a surfeit of respect talk in political philosophy, and a lot of which is due, as you’ve already noted, to Kant and neo-Kantian arguments about the importance of respecting persons, respecting personality. I’m not against respect, I suppose I should put that out there, but I think that it’s not adequate for understanding what’s going on with a virtue like civility, which is precisely the one we rely on in the absence of respect.
0:48:28 SC: So, so far you’re against autonomy, you’re against respect. This is just a messy society that you want to set out. So it’s is pretty harsh out there, pretty Hobbesian.
0:48:39 TB: I should say, Hobbes does figure in my book and he’s one of my foils. I argue against what I take to be the Hobbesian view of civility, which is what I call civil silence. Which is basically, “No, we can’t disagree.” And so civility is there to keep us from… Keep controversial topics off the table, keep us from saying anything offensive. It allows us to differ without disagreeing. And I actually think that that is the impulse behind a lot of civility talk today, is we want people to just stop being disagreeable already. So I’m against Hobbesian civility as I understand it. But you’re right, that my affection for Roger Williams-style mere civility is based on a fundamentally Hobbesian view about what people are like psychologically, both individually and in groups.
0:49:43 SC: So just to drive this home really, really hard because I think that people do get misled by the nomenclature a little bit, the way that it is used in many contemporary contexts, civility appears as a cudgel. There’s the dark side of civility, it’s actually a silencing move. Like, “Don’t talk to me that way. You’re not being civil, I don’t need to engage with you.” Whereas, you want to bring up the idea of civility as continuing to engage no matter how insulting other people are. And that’s the kind of prerequisite that we need to live in a pluralistic democracy.
0:50:21 TB: That’s right. I was struck when I was in grad school and when I was writing the book about just how often civility talk was and is used to shut down debate. We talk about civility precisely when we don’t want to make an argument about why our opponents are wrong. Instead, we want to say, “Oh, well, they’re uncivil and so I don’t have to engage with them at all.” There’s the expression that when we accuse someone of incivility, we place them implicitly beyond the pale. This expression “beyond the pale” is really telling, because it actually comes from the idea of the pale as a… In Latin, it comes from the idea of a stake, but the pale was the fence around the kind of city beyond which the barbarians reside.
0:51:12 TB: So, in Dublin, for instance, you had the pale of Dublin and the barbarous Catholics were beyond the pale. And so I think that really effectively illustrates what we’re doing when we say, “Oh, well, how can I be… So-and-so is being uncivil. I don’t need to engage with them.” But what I also point out is that… So accusing someone of incivility is a way of putting them beyond the pale, saying, exiling them from the community of respectable conversationalists. But similarly, being uncivil to someone does the same thing. It’s sort of, it says, “You’re not worth engaging with in a civil fashion. I can’t enjoy a life with you. All I can do is expel you from the borders,” and that then… I don’t think we can get away from that dynamic, so I say suppression and exclusion are always implicit when we’re talking about civility ’cause we’re always also talking about incivility, sort of talking about where we would draw the line.
0:52:22 TB: But what then needs to happen is we need to look at different ways of conceiving of civility and then see where the line is drawn in each case. So in the case of mere civility, I think that’s the kind of civility that is compatible with the maximally inclusive and maximally tolerant society that I would like to live in. There are other ways of conceiving uncivility.
0:52:46 SC: Yeah, I was going to say the example of Dublin was worth the entire price of admission to me, like now I know that beyond the pale is just a reference to barbarous Irish Catholics against civilized Anglo-Protestants. So that clarifies a lot to me. But I really do want to understand this. To me, the single biggest difficulty in trying to come down on, to figure out what side I am on in many of these debates is this issue of, are there people who are beyond the pale? I mean, are there people… ‘Cause I think the answer is yes, but I don’t know where to put them, but I think there are people who just aren’t worth engaging with, right? There are people who disagree with me in maybe a productive way. I mean, my philosophy of inviting people onto the podcast is I’ll certainly have people I disagree with, but only ones that I think I can get something from. And there are people who I would never have on the podcast because my only job would be like debunk them or make fun of them and what is the point of that?
0:53:46 TB: I think that’s right, and certainly, I don’t think that everyone is equally worth engaging. But by the same token, I don’t think that you, Sean, are proposing to sort of draw the limits of society as such based on the limits of whom you would invite onto your podcast, right? You sort of say, “This is a voluntary association. I am choosing the people with whom I’m going to debate in this context.” And what I worry about just generally in public debates about civility is that people are sort of indifferent or maybe insensitive to the ways in which their own judgements of who is and is worth not engaging are partial and sort of proposing then to think about civility intolerance generally on the basis of their partial judgements of who is and is worth not engaging. And there again, we go back to just, it’s a feature and a bug. This is how human beings think. It is the case that any person who talks about civility is implicitly valorizing themselves as an exemplar of civility.
0:54:57 TB: This includes me, and it also includes the people I talk about in my book, Roger Williams, Thomas Hobbes, and I also talk about John Locke. They’re all sort of implicitly holding themselves up, but only Williams, I think, really adequately accounts for the fact that his own judgements are biased. And as I show in the book, what that ends up leading to is this sort of seemingly paradoxical, but I think it’s not paradoxical conclusion that civility demands that we tolerate others’ incivility.
0:55:25 SC: Right.
0:55:26 TB: Right, so mere civility is mostly about being able and willing to put up with others and… But once put in that way, it would seem that, yes, that’s the appropriate way of thinking of civility in a tolerant society. But now, just to go back to your initial objection and very good point is also in a tolerant society I now then need to be free to associate in partial associations with those I choose, right? I’m not sort of committed to inviting my crackpot conspiracy theorist cousin to my Plato reading group. Right?
0:56:11 SC: Yes.
0:56:12 TB: But I am committed to not saying that he should be sort of stripped of his rights or sent to Canada.
0:56:19 SC: Well, yeah, I think that’s exactly… It’s a good distinction that you drew because I was a little vague in saying some people are not worth talking to. That depends a lot on the context in which we’re defining talking to, right? So, on Twitter, I am really good at blocking people. I have no patience for putting up with people who are just there to cause trouble, but I don’t want those people to be denied their right to vote in my society, right? Like I don’t want to voluntarily chat with them, but I think that they have a full right to have their voice heard in the polity. And that seems to be an important distinction, but it’s still hard because there are some people who maybe shouldn’t have the right to vote, I don’t know. But where to draw that line? So I was thinking more personally than politically when I said, where do we draw the line between people we feel are worth engaging with and people we just want to ignore.
0:57:11 TB: I think, I mean, and just becoming aware that those are two different lines I think is really sort of more than half the battle. I think that the Twitter example is really good there because Twitter and other sort of social media are… Really do occupy this ambiguous space, an ambiguous space in American law and also an ambiguous space just in our minds. We refer to them quaintly as platforms. Which is the traditional medium of amplifying the spoken word, but they also function as presses, as publishing. So when I tweet, it’s like I’m publishing my view and putting it out there then to be debated. And increasingly, these platforms become approximations of the public sphere, but on the other hand, they’re also private companies, but also private associations, right, I mean, Twitter can expel and deplatform those who violate its terms and conditions, right?
0:58:22 SC: Right.
0:58:22 TB: And so I think that the fact that so much of the debate is happening about speech on these platforms just contributes to the further confusion of what the limit is, what kind of limit is appropriate for different kinds of fora. And it sort of invites us to conflate the limit of our Twitter association with the limits of sort of tolerable views to be expressed in American society or British society, etcetera, as such. The other thing that social media platforms do, and it’s something that I come up against, and I imagine you do, too, is that they’re transnational in a way that’s great, but also can be highly misleading. So a lot of time, it really has come… It has just further exacerbated this cultural tendency to export all American culture wars to the world. [chuckle]
0:59:20 SC: Yeah, I feel bad for the rest of the world, yes.
0:59:23 TB: Yeah, but also, it brings us up against the fact that civility is always necessarily a kind of local standard. The standard of civility in American discourse is going to be different from the standard of civility in British discourse, but a forum like Twitter doesn’t allow us to actually distinguish between those audiences. And so that’s why also there are so many conflicts and disruptions and sort of moments where competing codes of civility clash, and that can also lead to this increasing sense of a crisis of civility, because we are… We have these amazing megaphones now that allow us to address audiences we could never even have dreamed of when we often feel like, “Oh, I’m just complaining to my friends.”
1:00:15 SC: Well, just to bring this down to sort of real-world conflicts here, so for example, consider the idea of deplatforming speakers at a university. There’s some people have an idea that if one group at my university wants to invite a speaker, even though I’m not a member of that group and I don’t have anything to do with them, I don’t like them, I don’t agree with them, I still… There’s some right, I’m putting words into their mouth ’cause I don’t feel this way myself, so I’m probably not making the best case for it, but there’s some justification for me trying to shut them down. I presume that going along with the civility discourse, you would be against that kind of shutting down.
1:01:03 TB: I think it’s complicated. Not to bury the lead, yes, I am concerned about no platforming and deplatforming and this rising tide of demands to deplatform at universities. However, I do think that universities are importantly distinct from society at large, so I do think that universities… Of course, this is different in the United States when it comes to public universities, which are covered by the First Amendment.
1:01:35 SC: Yeah.
1:01:36 TB: But in private universities, yeah, you can suppress and exclude people on the basis of their speech for the speech that you think that they might make. That’s fine, you have the right to do that. Now, the question is: Should you do that?
1:01:48 SC: Yeah.
1:01:49 TB: And there, I think that it’s a complicated question, but we should tend towards no. And the reason we should tend towards no is because, not because we’re going to violate the free speech rights of the speaker. So let’s take the case of, I don’t know, there are lots of controversy over on-campus talks given by Charles Murray a couple years ago. It’s not because I’m worried about Charles Murray’s free speech rights being infringed. I’m worried about the infringement of the free speech rights of the students who invite him.
1:02:23 SC: Right.
1:02:25 TB: So their right to sort of hear his argument. Now, so I would distinguish between…
1:02:28 SC: By the way, I mean, parenthetically, I think that’s it’s interesting to think of the right to listen to somebody as an aspect of free speech.
1:02:37 TB: Yeah, and again, it goes back to isegoria. I think that universities are sites or should aspire to be sites of isegoria, but sort of within their remit as educational institutions, I.e., so I’m not saying that means students are equal speakers on a par with their professors when it comes to matters of academic expertise. However, I do think a seminar is one of those places where we’re trying to realize the ideal of equal speech where everyone has a voice and feels able to get a hearing.
1:03:08 SC: Yeah.
1:03:10 TB: And so I do think that events like public talks on campus or private talks on campus are precisely places where we’re training students not only in speaking, but in listening and responding then to views that they don’t hold. So the… But I do think, so proponents of no or deplatforming have a case. The case is that in providing a controversial speaker like Murray or whoever a platform, we’re sort of endorsing, in some way, or elevating the content of their views, and that in a way that can cause harm or in some way threaten the equal standing of members of our community. I think there are cases where certain speakers should not be invited to campus.
1:04:02 SC: Well, I think it’s important to me to draw the distinction between if someone is invited by the university to see… Give a university-sponsored talk or receive an honorary degree or something, then I have no problem with members of the university community protesting that and trying to stop it. Where what I was imagining like some little sub-group of the university, the college racist association, the ones who invite Charles Murray, then even if I think that racism is bad, I think that I should let them do that.
1:04:36 TB: Yeah. And I’m inclined to make the same distinction. I do think there’s a clear distinction between inviting someone to give a commencement address and allowing the college Republicans to invite whomever they’d like, or the local Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement to invite whomever they’d like. I do think, however, that universities… There is a role for virtuous university administrators in this space to…
1:05:07 SC: Wait, what?
[laughter]
1:05:11 TB: To help guide student associations to act responsibly in extending invitations, to not encourage this kind of FU, sometimes, I think, to students inviting speakers to campus and also to engage in crowd management and determining what’s the appropriate venue for a speaker, etcetera. I think we often wanted to turn these cases into hard and fast conflicts over principle, when in fact, actually maybe the principle isn’t so controversial. It’s the question of the particular policies or prudential judgements about how we’re going to organize a specific event. But yeah, I’m inclined to agree with you. And I guess in terms of is there a kind of cultural problem growing in American campuses, I would be less inclined to look at particular cases where student associations have invited a controversial speaker and more to cases where university administrators have been pressured into rescinding invitations to speakers to give commencement addresses or to receive honorary doctorates. And those sort of incidents have been on the rise in recent years as well, but they don’t tend to be as headline-grabbing as, for instance, what happened at Middlebury with Charles Murray.
1:06:40 SC: Well, there certainly is a tendency, or at least a temptation… Students, bless their hearts. I was a student once, so were you, that students like to stir things up a little bit, and sometimes they’ll invite people just to be provocative. But putting that aside, talk about the extent to which there is a positive virtue in seeking out opposing views. Is that part of the civility paradigm or is it just we should tolerate these noisy people we disagree with? But I think that John Stuart Mill would probably make the case that we should actually make an effort to go listen to them. How does that fit into your slightly different point of view?
1:07:22 TB: So there’s a positive case as well. Whereas Mill emphasizes the importance of listening to contrary views so as to strengthen one’s own argument. He has that great line in On Liberty, “He who knows only his own side of a case knows little of that,” which I always love drawing students’ attention to. But as ever in my preference for 17th century evangelicals and their approach to this, it’s more an emphasis on… There’s little point, it seems to me, in discoursing exclusively with people who agree with you already. One reason for that is that there’s little point in that if you don’t already know what you think, which hopefully… I think most students don’t, I think most adults don’t. I’m very willing to admit that there are plenty of controversial topics on which people seem to have very strong views, but I have no idea what I think, and I think that’s perfectly appropriate.
1:08:21 TB: So there’s that consideration. But also on the topics on which I do have strong views, surely I should want to persuade others that I’m right and they’re wrong, rather than just having all of those wonderful back-slapping conversations with those people who already agree with me about how very wrong those people we never talk to are. So for me, it seems like what is the point of talk. I guess we always come back to that. Why bother talking to each other in the first place? And I think that there is something missing in the Millian account about that kind of evangelical impulse, the impulse to persuade and to try to bring others around to our way of thinking.
1:09:01 SC: Well, it also shows that there’s a political aspect to this where purity comes in. And I see online, online is not an accurate reflection of the world, but there are people who would argue that their favorite candidate shouldn’t want the support of certain groups because those groups are bad or they’re insufficiently good. And my thought is, if I’m a political candidate, I want everyone, literally, everybody to vote for me. I want the worst people in the world to vote for me, that doesn’t mean I endorse their views, but I’m happy to take their support.
1:09:37 TB: As a political theorist, I do, again, wonder often about people’s understanding of how democracy works and the importance of coalition building. That’s glib, but there’s a serious point there. I mean, yes, we want to win elections.
1:10:00 SC: Yeah. Well…
1:10:01 TB: The point of elections is to win.
1:10:04 SC: Are you sure it’s not to demonstrate our purity, ’cause I’ve got the impression…
[laughter]
1:10:10 TB: And we do. We come to this really perverse state of affairs where actually the point of an election is to lose, but to lose for the right reasons. And I just… I find that difficult to square then with the criterion upon which we are… The criteria upon which we’re demanding purity, I.e., our vision of a just society. And surely, if we want to make a society more just, we’ve got to win the election in order to do so. I think you’re right. I mean, there is… Again, if we think about the advantages of the long view, Puritanism became a bad word or Puritanism is a kind of pejorative in contemporary politics. But of course, I study 17th century Puritans and I see all of the virtues of Puritanism.
[laughter]
1:11:01 TB: So to call something Puritan isn’t to criticize it in my view. But I do think studying Puritanism and the drive for purity within political and social and spiritual movements, you can see its benefits and you can also see its disadvantages quite clearly. And I would just say that another reason I like Williams, maybe, Williams was a Puritan, but he was so Puritan that he realized that everybody else was going to hell.
1:11:32 SC: Yeah.
1:11:32 TB: Which meant that he had to compromise with those people who are going to hell in order to be able to get anything done. He has this wonderful line, “One must go out of the world if one would not keep company with idolaters.” So insofar as we’re stuck in this world, we’ve really got to make the best of it and do the good we can, and we can’t do that good without other people.
1:11:58 SC: Well, that’s what makes him so interesting, because he did somehow manage to be a successful political leader despite these strong philosophical views, which is not typically…
1:12:07 TB: That’s a controversial statement. Oftentimes people come back to me and they say, “Rhode Island wasn’t a success… “
1:12:14 SC: Okay.
1:12:15 TB: I say, “Well, what’s your criterion of success?” Rhode Island was the last colony to ratify the Constitution. You’re saying that like it’s a bad thing.
[laughter]
1:12:27 TB: But yeah, I just think the thing about… We don’t tend to think of Rhode Island when we’re thinking about early modern societies to hold up as exemplars. But that being said, it was at the time, and for a long time, the most tolerant society in the world. It was the only society, to my knowledge, without an, and certainly in the world of western Christendom, but also beyond, without an established church. I mean, that’s bananas. Very often, Williams is linked with John Locke as though Williams just made Locke’s arguments 50 years earlier and with a bunch of unnecessary scriptural quotations. But there’s a really important difference in that Williams argued that tolerance required that there not be an established church. Locke was okay with establishment so long as church attendance wasn’t mandatory.
1:13:18 TB: So I think these kinds of differences, which from one perspective are kind of, “Oh, well, these are small distinctions that are maybe of interest to historians,” I would actually say no, they’re actually quite significant. And understanding those distinctions in sort of historical context can help us make sense of some of the confounding factors to our attempts to put our principles into practice today. The only other thing just to say on the point about moral purity and politics today, I mean, if we’re worried about free speech, the principle of free speech as a means to just further entrenching the status quo, nothing is better for the status quo than Puritanism in politics. If we’re so worried about having only the right people on our side, we can absolutely be assured that things will continue to go as they are.
1:14:09 SC: Well, I have to say, even taking into account your affection for 17th century evangelicals, I was impressed by your ability to link the Quakers with contemporary debates over the use of pronouns to talk about different gender identities. You have to share that with our audience. And maybe it’ll lead us into a little bit of talk about the connection between freedom of speech and civility and equality, which is a whole another bag of worms.
1:14:38 TB: Oh, brilliant. And equality is my current hobby horse. So it’s very much on my mind. As you mentioned, I wrote this article that was published by The New York Times editorial page about the politics of pronouns using early Quakers as an example.
1:15:00 SC: As one does.
1:15:03 TB: As one does. Well, as a group that was really concerned about the ways in which the rules of grammar stood in the way of an egalitarian society. And so it sounds funny, but it’s actually really… There’s a really serious point, much like contemporary trans and gender queer activists who are arguing for the importance of gender-neutral pronouns, Quakers thought that the English second person pronoun “you” was actually a form of… And again, because we’re talking the 17th century, I’m going to use their terms, but a form of idolatry or devil worship.
1:15:46 TB: So the reason for this, which is not immediately obvious to modern speakers of English, is because “you” is actually the plural. In early modern English, there was a singular second person pronoun, which was “thee,” and a plural second person pronoun, which was “you.” And so in the 17th century, around the time that Quakers are becoming active, you’re seeing this change in English grammar, where “thee” is basically being crowded out by “you.” Everybody is beginning to use the second person plural. And Quakers like George Fox, William Penn saw this as basically, as a demand for everyone to have a kind of elevated status, much like the queen refers to herself as “we,” the royal we.
1:16:35 TB: Everybody is now demanding that they be acknowledged as you. And obviously, this sounds weird for English speakers, but anyone who knows a Romance language, or German or any other language that has a distinction between the plural and the singular, where the plural “you” is used in cases of deference, will understand the kind of politics here. And so Quakers, instead of just putting up and shutting up, they decided to wage a campaign against the plural you, and so the Quakers insisted on using singular pronouns, the “thee” and “thou,” with not just other Quakers, but with everyone. And so if you look at the early reception of Quakers, and which was far from welcoming, one of the main things that really pisses people off at the time is that they object to the Quaker use of thee as a form of insult or contempt. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say to 17th century English speakers to be called thee by a Quaker was a kind of hate speech, it was a kind of contempt.
1:17:37 SC: It sounds completely bizarre to modern ears because we… Because it’s archaic, we think of thee and thou as somehow more formal, but they were exactly the opposite, they were the sort of familiar, casual way of talking.
1:17:50 TB: Absolutely, and so Roger Williams, who I’ve been extolling for the past hour for his extraordinary tolerance, the one group to really test his patients was the Quakers, and it was precisely because he thought that their use of thee and thou expressed contempt. And I guess it was a contempt he didn’t like, because he was perfectly fine with expressing contempt in other ways, but there was a real worry about the Quakers’ unwillingness to kind of just go with the flow and to abide by the culturally contingent norms of respectful behavior. So the Quakers’ unwillingness to be merely civil, so that’s where, you know, these two stories connect once more.
1:18:32 TB: But anyway, so I was just really interested in trying to parse the egalitarian politics of Quaker pronouns, and in the article, I contrast that, actually, with contemporary activists, because from the Quakers’ perspective, what trans activists want, or those who speak for them, maybe it is more correct to say, with gender-neutral pronouns, it basically is the right for everyone to be able to choose their own pronouns. And to the Quakers that wouldn’t be a kind of claim to equality at all, it would actually be a kind of claim to distinction. It would be a way of saying, well, everyone’s entitled to pick their own title.
1:19:13 TB: And so the Quaker view is in a sense that equality demands that everybody just be treated as contemptible and sort of leveled down. We might distinguish here between leveling up versions of equality where everyone is treated as an aristocrat and leveling down versions where everyone is treated as a commoner, and the Quakers are firmly in the leveling down camp. And so that comparison, I think, is a helpful one for seeing here is a contemporary issue that’s really controversial. Tempers and tensions run high on this question of gender-neutral pronouns, but if we consider it with historical perspective, we can actually see, well, here is a conflict, not about whether or not we care about equality, but rather about what equality demands of us in our interactions. And I think that’s really helpful for kind of reframing this controversial topic in such a way that people can actually see, okay, well, maybe people on the other side have a point. I don’t have to agree with it, but they have a point. And in recognizing they have a point, I can therefore engage.
1:20:19 SC: Well, okay, so what’s the right answer?
[laughter]
1:20:25 TB: Well, I’m in the process of writing this new book, which is tentatively entitled First Among Equals, and it’s about the theory and practice of equality in the 17th century and what that can help us understand about the theory and practice of equality today. But I suppose one answer is that egalitarian politics is ever a mixture of leveling up and leveling down, and attempts to focus exclusively on one poll will fail, because they’re both really important. The second answer is that as ever, there’s a cultural difference, and here I’m really inspired by work by James Q. Whitman on, who’s a legal historian at Yale, and he’s written a book called Harsh Justice, which was really interested in why the American justice system is so much more brutal than European systems and systems of punishment.
1:21:33 TB: And Jim’s answer is that, well, look, American equality was always about treating everyone equally badly, whereas in Europe, in these formerly aristocratic societies, equality became a business of bringing everyone up to the level of aristocrats. The best example of this is the use of the guillotine in the French Revolution, because beheading was the form of capital punishment reserved for aristocrats, whereas commoners would be hanged, right?
1:22:03 SC: Ah, I never knew that.
1:22:03 TB: So the French Revolution was an egalitarian movement, and one of the ways that this manifested was by saying, well, no, everybody gets to get their head cut off.
1:22:13 SC: Okay, yes, that’s a leveling down, I suppose?
1:22:17 TB: No, no, that’s…
1:22:17 SC: That’s leveling up. I’m sorry, that’s leveling up, yeah.
1:22:19 TB: The Procrustean bed of leveling up. In [1:22:23] ____ everywhere in the American case, all criminals could be subjected to corporal punishment, and that was to treat them as slaves. So anyway, I’m interested too in kind of differences of cultures that we might describe as broadly egalitarian and then how that issues in kind of social and cultural norms, but I’m also… I guess the main upshot of my work on equality at the moment is that I think that equality is perhaps less important normatively than we tend to think it is in contemporary politics. And so a lot of times that when people are talking about equality, I think they’re actually not so concerned about equality, they’re concerned about other things. And so one of the things I’d like to do in thinking more about equality is try to parse what is it that we’re actually talking about when we’re talking about equality.
1:23:24 SC: Well, this was actually what… I wanted to ask you about this, because it’s not clear to me whether we should be thinking about… Maybe this goes back to Milton versus Mill again. Is equality something that we should take as a metaphysical principle, that people are created equal? Or is it just the most convenient pragmatic way to act in a democracy, to give people equal claim on various rights and resources, even though we don’t actually think of them as equal to us.
1:23:57 TB: Yeah. So you can talk about the difference between Mill and Milton, but you might also think about the difference between Hobbes and Kant again. For Hobbes, the idea that people are equal is essentially a pragmatic belief. So we agree to treat others as though they were our equals, even though they are in fact not equal. Because that’s what makes a stable and peaceful society possible, as opposed to the kind of Kantian view which says that, well, treating people with equal dignity is a reflection of their basic equality, that it’s fundamentally grounded in facts about us as moral persons. And I guess my own view… Again, this won’t surprise you based on the discussion we’ve been having, is I do incline to the Hobbesian view that human beings are not in fact equal along any of the dimensions that we might point to, although there are long-standing debates in moral and political philosophy about how we should understand that claim, and it’s a complicated issue.
1:25:14 TB: But that we are… The more pressing political concern, is how… What should a society that resolves to treat people as equals look like? So what’s demanded? But that sort of view that says that it’s less important to justify a basic equality than it is to actually think about what treating people as equals means, would be strongly objected to by someone like Jeremy Waldron, who would say that, no, that amounts to just sort of arbitrarily saying that, well, people are equal because we say so, and that’s a very weak grounding for something so important. So I’m very sensitive to, and I take seriously the other side. But I guess one thing that becomes really clear, again, when we treat these questions historically is, that the belief or the dogma that human beings are somehow equal by nature, it’s not actually that important for egalitarian politics. And I say that because we tend to think about natural equality as something that was discovered or invented in the 17th century, or thereabouts.
1:26:26 TB: Suddenly everybody realized, oh, right, we were created equal, and that this has consequences, and we’d better get on that. [chuckle] It’s not what happened at all. The idea that human beings were equal by nature was a philosophical and a theological commonplace for millennia. It just wasn’t seen as having social and political consequences. And so the interesting question for me, is why suddenly, in and around the 17th century, does this idea of natural equality suddenly begin to have consequences that we might recognize as egalitarian. And I just… I’m really interested to sort of unpick the Just So historical stories that so often inform a lot of the moral and political philosophical discussion of basic equality that assumes that, oh, well, modernity is defined by its commitment to natural equality in a way that pre-modernity wasn’t, and that’s just factually wrong. And so I think there’s a benefit that comes from correcting the record in any case.
1:27:36 SC: Well, maybe to close here, we can bring it to… Back up to the present day, having enjoyed the 17th century and similar debates for a while. So I’m trying to take what you’ve said about civility and free speech and put it in the context of the contemporary debate over cancel culture, for example, right? If I think of, just to take one very specific example, JK Rowling has gotten a lot of pushback for saying things that are interpreted in certain circles as being anti-trans, anti-transgender people. And on the one hand, you could say, well, JK Rowling has the right to say whatever she wants. That has nothing to do with you buying her books or anything like that. She has the right to say all these things. On the other hand, you can say, well, these people have the right to criticize her and ask other people not to buy her books, and is that actually a happy medium, or is there some decline of Western civilization going on here because JK Rowling cannot tweet about what she wants?
[laughter]
1:28:40 TB: Yes. This signals the decline of Western civilization like…
1:28:46 SC: That’s what I’ve heard.
1:28:47 TB: No other event.
[laughter]
1:28:50 TB: It is funny, right. There is this tendency to treat the latest crisis as though, oh, this is totally unprecedented, and this finally is…
1:28:57 SC: Never before.
1:28:58 TB: That last nail in the… Nail in the coffin. Yeah, I mean, for the current debate about cancel culture, on the one hand I agree with critics who say, oh, you know, worries about cancel culture are overblown. JK Rowling is hardly at risk of being silenced because she has the power, prestige, privilege, etcetera, where she can actually speak out. And so I am sensitive to that. I don’t think that people saying mean things to JK Rowling on Twitter is somehow the most pressing kind of social justice issue of our time. However… Right, and then there’s the big however.
1:29:40 SC: Yeah.
1:29:40 TB: I do think that there is a kind of cultural problem. I don’t think it’s recent, I think it’s been coming on for ages, it’s very much implicit in the kind of, the stuff that I was writing about civility in the 2010s and earlier. And it’s this sort of intolerance for views or the people who happen to hold those views that we consider to be intolerable, and I do think that there is this kind of push to redefine the meaning of tolerance to something more like a tolerant society is one wherein everybody accepts and includes everybody else.
1:30:25 TB: And for reasons we’ve already discussed, I just don’t think that can fly. I think that might be an accepting society, but an accepting society isn’t a tolerant one. And I was bemused by a lot of the pushback against Rowling and against the Harper’s letter, which she signed and others signed, sort of saying, oh well, one, there is no such thing as cancel culture, which was one response. Two, if there is cancel culture it is in no way infringing the freedom of speech of the people who are complaining about it. And three, if it is infringing the freedom of speech and they’re complaining about it, well, that’s a good thing.
1:31:08 SC: Yeah.
1:31:09 TB: Right? So obviously these three responses are not themselves compatible, although lots of people were saying all three. But, I do, yeah, I just think, well, yes, of course, there’s a concern about freedom of speech there, it’s a concern about a culture turning against parrhesia, and of course it’s the people who are most powerful within that system, people who have a huge platform like Rowling, who feel able to speak out against it, right?
1:31:35 TB: And so my concern is those who don’t share that power, who don’t share that privilege and who nevertheless see what happens to someone like Rowling or you know, it’s… Or pick whomever, your sacrificial lamb of the moment is. See what happens when someone says something that others object to and conclude quite rightly that it’s not worth taking the risk for themselves.
1:32:00 SC: Yeah.
1:32:01 TB: And I approach these issues again from the perspective of someone trying to teach young people to think and argue and disagree with each other, and I see it in my students this sort of… We do a free speech unit, and this sort of unwillingness, even in that seminar discussion, which of course was taking place on Zoom because this is…
1:32:24 SC: Of course.
1:32:24 TB: This is the end of times.
1:32:26 SC: Yeah.
1:32:27 TB: Is unwillingness to sort of say things that they were afraid their peers would think of as being unacceptable. And already, we already are so sensitive to what other people think of us. Of course, this kind of culture will have a chilling effect. And of course JK Rowling deciding to sue someone for libel will have a chilling effect. And my wish would be just that people remembered that freedom of speech was about more than simply legal rights before things got so out of hand.
1:33:08 SC: I guess, again, I’m broadly sympathetic to everything you’re saying here, but to sort of channel the concerns that immediately pop up. We haven’t gotten this on the table yet, so it’s important to get it, that the people who complained about JK Rowling are not necessarily saying, look, I have an intellectual disagreement with you, they’re saying, look, I am a member of a group that is under-powered, discriminated against, silenced in society and you are denying my right to exist. And so they would say this is beyond the pale, this is something that I can object to, this kind of speech existing not just to the content of what you’re saying.
1:33:55 TB: So that is very much the case that’s made, and again, I take seriously the claim there, which I see as a claim to isegoria. But I come back to what should be given priority in the public sphere of a tolerant society, and to me the priority has to go to parrhesia precisely because my commitment to allowing JK Rowling to speak her mind is not because I value the contents of her mind, it’s because I value the contents of the minds of those people who haven’t hitherto had a voice. And I do, I mean, you’re right to push me on this, because I do simply reject, and do so seriously and I hope respectfully, but I do reject the claim that anything that JK Rowling might say about trans women denies their right to exist.
1:34:49 SC: Okay.
1:34:50 TB: I think that you might say, okay, there are certain speech acts… I can engage, I can utter the phrase, “trans women don’t have the right to exist.” But even my uttering that precise phrase would not deny them the right to exist precisely because my speech isn’t authoritative in that way. And it’s not authoritative precisely because we live in a society wherein no one person’s speech is given that authority. And I think here we come specifically to the issue about Rowling, which it has to do with the powerful position she occupies as a kind of venerated figure among young people, many of whom feel themselves to be outsiders and outcasts, because of being the creator of the Harry Potter universe. And there I would just say, well, the right thing to do then is, or one thing to do, and I think a good thing to do is take advantage of the wonderful invention that is fan fiction, and do what you will with her characters.
1:35:52 SC: Yeah.
1:35:53 TB: Right? You know, claim it for yourself and use your own voice. I, I just… I do… Again, I spent a lot of time as someone who grew up being a free speech fundamentalist, not thinking very deeply about these issues at all. I have learned so much by reading and engaging with the arguments of people who criticize that view. And so, I would say that I’ve become much more reflective in the holding of my views. But what I do see in the debate about free speech and cancel culture on the internet, and right in this specific moment, is a lot of trans women speaking up for themselves, yes. But I also see a lot of cisgendered, usually white, usually men, people speaking up on behalf of those they take to be disenfranchised or marginalized. And I would just really encourage everybody to reflect really hard on when we claim to be speaking for someone else. Because, again, it goes back to my point, which is that individuals… Identities don’t speak, individuals do.
1:37:09 TB: And so, yes, I think many trans women are justifiably hurt or upset, frustrated and aggrieved by things that JK Rowling has said. But I would say that not all trans women are. And that should be the discussion we’re having. This reification of gender and racial identities in this moment, again, I think is politically necessary sometimes, but shouldn’t itself be the end goal.
1:37:35 SC: And maybe the point to end on is actually something that was there in what you said earlier about civility, the challenge to the listener. The fact that being this kind of participant in a democratic, wild and woolly civil disagreement kind of society is tough. It means we’re going to have to hear things we don’t like, and it’s our responsibility to deal with that in some way other than silencing.
1:38:05 TB: And I would just… I acknowledge that the burdens of that dealing with, or the burdens of putting up with unpleasant, uncivil, or even hateful speech, are unequally distributed. That’s absolutely right. It’s the members of racial minorities, gender minorities, other disaffected, other alienated, marginalized groups are called upon to tolerate more. And I just take that as given, and I take that as undesirable, and I think it is in many ways unjust. Recognizing that fact, though, is not itself then a sort of refutation of or denial of the importance of free speech, or saying that an alternative system would be better, would distribute the burdens more equally. It might, but I, again, I think that we have a lot of historical data to suggest that it would not. And so, the question then is, well, how can we make the best of the system that we have? And I think that the answer there has to do with the cultural institutions, it has to do with associational freedom, and yes, it has to do with a culture of speaking one’s mind, and of developing the virtues that allow us to do that in an engaged way, but also to listen in return.
1:39:21 TB: And I just remind readers and listeners what people said at the time of Roger Williams’ Rhode Island. They called it Rogue’s Island. They called it the latrine of New England. Nobody, not even Roger Williams, thought that this was a particularly nice place to live. But the business of toleration isn’t pretty. It’s difficult and it requires the managing of things that are and will remain disagreeable. And there is a sort of orientation, not just in politics generally, but in political theory and political philosophy specifically, which seems to say, well, some of these problems can be transcended or dissolved. And I just think that that’s not right. Some of these problems are permanent and we just have to rub along and make the best of it.
1:40:08 SC: The business of toleration is not pretty. I like that. That’s a very good motto to end on. And what’s important here is that now we know what side you’re on. So we’ve… We’ve achieved our goal.
1:40:18 TB: I know. Gosh, it’s just… Well, the good… I suppose, ’cause there’s the… Is it the Groucho Marx line? I would never be a club… I would never be a member of a club that would have me as a member. The second that I find myself on a side is the second I have to think really hard and reconsider my position. So I just… I’m lucky enough to have the job and position that I do that allows me to do that. And I don’t take it for granted.
1:40:50 SC: It’s something to aspire to. So Teresa Bejan, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.
1:40:54 TB: Thank you very much for having me. I’ve really enjoyed it.
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Enjoyed the podcast. Being brought up in a world with such an abundance of communication has surely influenced our current conception of free speech compared to being in small agricultural societies where social control probably came a lot from the threat of gossip and shame (talk about chilling effect!) or even from the time of the US founding fathers where free speech would probably have been limited to white landholding men. One follow-up, to the note on being influenced by Hobbs’ view of society, I would recommend an episode with Rutger Bregman on his book Humankind and how we are actually quite pro-social as a species.
Civility, to me, is being able to comprehend another human being’s thought processes, in real time (Einstein’s “spooky action”), theoretically speaking, relative to societies, as a whole (globally / nationally). We, as individuals, in order to survive, need to bond physically, mentally, and spiritually, in order to eliminate subconscious fears. Making priorities that are in the right order and that may get resolved in the proper order may result in finding common grounds. Therefore, the discipline displayed is like a behavior score, to me, and it allows for the “meeting of the minds” and / or “seeing eye to eye.” Until society, as a whole, can resolve their past differences of opinion and stop playing the victim of a particular emotional deficit, we will continue to become more divisive, exponentially, in the future, to me. It is important to understand the differences of wants vs needs. Democracy is supposed to work for everyone with a certain amount of preplanning, but it requires a collective effort to agree on a common goal for the common good, without leaving anyone behind, relative to any difference that may occur, to me. Thanks for this podcast Sean!
Allow me to exercise my right of free speech, Dr. Carroll, in order to share a thought on the twin issues of tolerance and civility. It is my contention that, for the good of all civil human beings, segregation on any basis one (or one’s friends or business partners, as the case may be) chooses, whether it be race, sex, religion, etc., ought to be legalised. That is to say, one ought to be able to practice it on a voluntary basis rather than have it mandated via legal proscription in a top-down fashion, as was done in the southern United States during the Jim Crow era. It is crucial to understand the distinction between merely legalising, and making mandatory by force of law. Mandating the desegregation of society was a foolish, shortsighted response to the proscriptive overreach of Jim Crow. It ought to have been made illegal to enforce a code of conduct in either direction, whether it be pro or anti-segregation. If this were ever to happen, it would allow for the eventual creation of (on a relative basis) peaceful, stable societies unburdened by the endesss attrition of ethnic strife into which we’ve recently plunged headlong in America. As things currently stand, we are headed for a catastrophic outcome if the prevailing ideas regarding freedom of association and disassociation are not reassessed in light of the evidence we see all around us of the consequences of denying ourselves such freedom.
https://ourdistinguishedheartcollector.tumblr.com/post/630697825616969728/116-teresa-bejan-on-free-speech-civility-and
With the utmost respect.
1:09:01 SC: “… there are people who would argue that their favorite candidate shouldn’t want the support of certain groups because those groups are bad or they’re insufficiently good. And my thought is, if I’m a political candidate, I want everyone, literally, everybody to vote for me. I want the worst people in the world to vote for me, that doesn’t mean I endorse their views, but I’m happy to take their support.”
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This argument ignores the math of First Past The Post elections.
Under the First Past The Post election method, there is absolutely no benefit to receiving greater than 51% of the vote. After that milestone is a reached, the election is decided.
A campaign strategy that attempts to appeal to 100% is wasting its time and resources pursuing the remaining 49%, who’s votes are superfluous. No savvy candidate would actually attempt to court 100% of the population.
The more efficient strategy is to acknowledge that reaching 100% support is unnecessary/unachievable, and to instead focus on the minimum amount of votes needed to win the election. From there we see campaigns tactically deciding who to include in their coalition, and who to leave out in the cold. As those decisions are made, we see campaigns aggressively pursuing 51% of the voters while quietly (or in some cases loudly) telling the remaining 49% to screw off.
Additionally, every group that a campaign does include in their coalition creates wiggle room to kick other groups out. So for example, if your campaign was unwilling to disavow white supremacists, it would suggests that you view them as a critical part of your coalition.
With this backdrop, it is completely reasonable to scrutinize the groups that the campaign has decided to include in their coalition.
Free Speech in today’s world is hamstrung by the format, the medium, we get to express ourselves through.
The Comment Section format is deeply flawed. Not addressing an individual, but posting a comment AFTER a thoughtful, well sifted article or podcast, we are asked for rougher opinion, and we proclaim it to the entire world, forever.
we need to change Comment sections. I have several ideas that would be fruitful, about letting the poster, the one who comments, be also a MODERATOR, and the two talking must both approve of the back and forth to end up with a post anyone else can see. Thinking along this line, and finding paths/algorithms that work is easy to achieve with current processes. Let’s tame the internet, not by curbing free speech, but by creating Comment section ettiquette.