Are Safe Speech and Progressive Stack Good for Social Justice?
Free speech was once a central issue for the left in the West. As recently as the 1960s, leftist college students started a Free Speech Movement, so that they could protest conscription and the Vietnam War, as well as various social injustices. Western progressives, ideological descendents of enlightenment thinking, have long considered free speech to be vital to the spread and discussion of ideas, so rationality can win out and old and unfair prejudices can be abandoned.
However, the Western left’s commitment to free speech seems to have come to an end in recent years.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?
To be fair, the trend may have actually started a few decades ago, with the rise of ‘political correctness’. But even back then, political correctness was mostly only about things like using respectful words to describe minorities, and did not severely limit the actual ideas that could be expressed. In recent years, however, political correctness has been superseded by safe speech, where speech that is considered to hurt the feelings of certain groups of people is not allowed. At a glance this doesn’t seem to be that horrible: I too would prefer to hear less racist, sexist and homophobic talk. However, the underlying idea is not so harmless: safe speech implies that speech we do not wish to hear can, and should, be censored. It is in fact no different from the attitude of conservatives who wished to limit speech promoting civil rights, or indeed more recent laws that ban the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ in many countries. In promoting safe speech, the social justice movement is in fact removing the very thing that allowed them to come into existence in the first place.
It is increasingly claimed by some in the left that safe speech is not only good for, but is indeed required for, social justice. But is this true? On the surface, safe speech means that minorities don’t have to hear hurtful things, but then this is only a band-aid solution. Real social justice demands more. Just like we never accepted Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell as government policy, we should not settle for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell when it comes to racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes. Instead, we should encourage active discussion, to change people’s minds. Banning unpleasant speech without actually changing attitudes only sweeps the problems under the carpet, which may be fine for some in an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ way, but certainly isn’t enough for the minorities awaiting real social justice.
The so-called ‘progressive stack’
An associated issue is the rise of the so-called ‘progressive stack’. First popularized in various Occupy movements, the ‘progressive stack’ is a system of assigning priority to speak based on ‘privilege’, so that less privileged minorities have more opportunity to speak. In practice, however, such a system needs to be policed by certain individuals to work. This means that, the right to speak is being regulated by gatekeepers. Such gatekeepers therefore have the power to simply ban what they don’t want to be heard from being spoken, whether such speech comes from minorities or not. In turn, it also means that those who want to speak, whether from minority backgrounds or not, must first learn what speech is acceptable to the gatekeepers, and what speech is not. The gatekeepers have moral agency over everyone, because they effectively decide what is allowed into the marketplace of ideas.
The best way to advance social justice?
As a Moral Libertarian, I believe that the free market of ideas is actually the best way to advance social justice. History has shown us that ideas about social justice need to be refined over time, and leftists ‘establishments’ have often stood in the way of grassroots attempts to effect such change. Examples have included the neglect of women of colour in early feminist movements, the extreme transphobia that was common in second wave feminism, and the refusal of the then-establishment LGBT activists to help fight for marriage equality. In a free market of ideas, everyone would be allowed to make their case for change, and activist establishments would not have any special power to limit the conversation to prevent change. Rationality always prevails in a free market of ideas, and rationality is the most effective way to root out racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and more-radical-than-thou attitudes that plague activist establishments much more often than we would like to think. The free market of ideas will allow truly grassroots voices for change to be heard louder and clearer, and adapative change to be forced upon establishments much more effectively.
