I just don't get the concept that the best way to fight "dehumanization" is through speech bans. Nothing is more characteristically human than speech; respect for freedom of speech is the sin qua non of respecting someone's humanity. It is far less dehumanizing for Louis Farrakhan to suggest that his Jewish opponents are "termites" than it would be for us to tell Louis Farrakhan that he wasn't permitted to speak in public.
The right to think for yourself is one of the clearest cases of natural rights: nature itself defends this right. As long as you have a human brain -- unless some opponent should lobotomize it or physically destroy it -- you will think. Speech is just one step removed from this natural human right, as it's just a way of putting your thoughts in the air. No one has to agree with them. No one is necessarily going to be persuaded. Hearing Farrakhan doesn't make me scorn or dislike Jews; it persuades me only that he's a nasty person. But I know he's a person. I know it in part because I got to hear him speak his thoughts.
Freedom of speech should be non-negotiable, especially in America. Whatever they do elsewhere, here we speak our minds.
2 comments:
I think most of the hoo-raw over Twitter's permitting Farrakhan's racist speech is about Twitter's dishonest hypocrisy (excuse the redundancy): Jack Dorsey's decision to permit some speech, which he chooses to find tolerable, while actively banning other speech of which he personally disapproves. Were he consistent, there'd be less beefing.
...we speak our minds.
Banning speech is dehumanizing in the other direction, too. It says that we're all so grindingly inferior, so sub-human, that we have to be protected from hearing uncomfortable speech. We just can't handle it; we need our human superiors to shelter us.
Eric Hines
We just can't handle it; we need our human superiors to shelter us.
That does seem to be the position of the college campus left.
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