The High Price of Free Speech

America’s love affair with free speech is not doing exactly what it says on the tin. And that should worry all of us.

Americans love free speech. We view it as the most important human right — more so than voting or a fair trial. Benjamin Franklin went so far as to call freedom of speech “a principal pillar of a free government: when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved.” Most Americans would agree with Franklin’s sentiment. But why?

Historically, the most common defense is that it offers humans the best chance to collectively arrive at the truth. Justice Louis Brandeis employed this line of justification in Whitney v. California—an opinion considered “perhaps the greatest defense of freedom of speech ever written by a member of the high court.” Brandeis argued that unbridled freedom of speech was necessary, even if it allowed for unfortunate and discriminatory opinions, because it fostered a “marketplace of ideas.” Within this proverbial marketplace, Brandeis contended, rational citizens could select which arguments and viewpoints they found to be most appealing. The late Justice saw an expansive interpretation of freedom of speech as “indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.”

He’s not alone.

For centuries, Americans have been warned by many activists and thinkers that repression of certain speech would hinder our progress. Recently, conservative journalist Fred Bauer wrote that if pure tolerance of speech was rescinded that “society would divide into tribes and have self-righteous screaming as a constant soundtrack.”

And yet, here we are. Our society’s strict adherence to free speech has led us to the very dystopia that the Enlightment principle was designed to avoid. In a land where anyone can pretty much say anything, there is now a “truth decay” in our democracy. Alt-facts have flourished while rational discourse has not.

Hillary Clinton, yesterday, wrote, “When we can’t trust what we hear from our leaders, experts, and news sources, we lose our ability to hold people to account, solve problems, comprehend threats, judge progress, and communicate effectively with one another — all of which are crucial to a functioning democracy.” Meanwhile, in authoritarian countries which actively censor speech like South Africa, Italy, Brazil and China trust in the media and government is getting better.

So what’s going on here? Well, it appears that free speech in America isn’t achieving its necessary end. We’re seeing in real time that when speech is indiscriminately tolerant, tie goes to the liar. Climate change. Obama’s birthplace. Deaths in Puerto Rico. Truth is losing power, not gaining it, in a society where tolerance of speech is pure. That’s problematic for the continuation of a functioning democracy, notes Jason Stanley, a leading philosopher on propaganda and fascism. For Stanley, “freedom requires knowledge,” and so a key part of “what fascists politics does is get people to disassociate from reality.”

It is this fear of losing the meaning of truth, and thus our freedoms, which sparked the backlash against the New Yorker’s recent invitation to Steve Bannon. By offering him a platform, the magazine prioritized free speech over the protection of truth—a trade-off which asymmetrically benefits repressive forces. We saw this same reaction play out when Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, defended his company’s tolerance of Alex “Gay Frogs” Jones account (which has since been revoked):

Here, Dorsey is appealing to what the French philosopher Herbert Marcuse called the “benevolent neutrality” of free speech. Essentially: Let people say whatever the heck they want, let people debate these conflicting ideas, and eventually the truth will win.

This hands-off, value-neutral approach to public discourse is based upon a a noble, albeit naive, assumption: that humans are “rational beings” capable of sifting through all viewpoints to arrive at a place of thoughtful consensus. But we know that’s not how humans operate. We are, as Marcuse claims, easily “manipulated and indoctrinated” to “parrot, as [our] own, the opinion of [our] master.”

None of these observations on human nature would shock any cognizant person. So why then are we so stunned by the dilution of truth in America? Marcuse certainly wouldn’t be. When he wrote about the subject in the 1960s, he was quick to point out that democratic tolerance would naturally lead a free society to a destructive sort of tolerance. That conclusion, which seems iconoclastic at first glance, is really quite prescient.

But where does Marcuse’s analysis leave us? Can one accept that indiscriminate tolerance of speech can aid the repression of others, while also appreciating that allowing the government to limit speech would also be a “recipe for dogmatism,” as Barack Obama stated?

I find myself at this uneasy junction, looking down both paths and seeing that there are no good choices available. Is this a cop-out by a privileged white man? Or is this a fair conclusion to reach on such a difficult topic? I honestly don’t know. I do know, however, that America’s love affair with free speech is not doing exactly what it says on the tin. And that should worry all of us.