Through the last six years, the Bush administration has engaged in a systematic attack on free speech in this country. We discussed last time about how the Bush administration has violated each one of the first ten amendments of the Constitution. Part of the reason is that for far too long, we have taken our rights of free speech for granted here in the Western world and have not developed a rational basis for defending our rights to say what we want in this country. It is important that we address this issue because the Bush administration’s attacks on free speech continue with the attacks on network neutrality and the belief by the Bush administration that peace activists are somehow terrorists.
John Stuart Mill was one of the foremost advocates of free speech back in the 19th century when these issues still mattered in the public debate. One of the ways we need to combat the Bush administration’s attacks on free speech is to bring these writings back to the public sphere and discuss them so that people can recognize and respond to attacks on our free speech.
We pick up on Mill in his work On Liberty in his chapter on liberty on thought and discussion. In this chapter, he lays out the basis for freedom of speech and discusses some arguments against the use of free speech.
The first argument that he makes is that people have no right to give up their liberties. This is what people do when they experience the kind of terror and panic that ensued after 9/11. This is when people long for a father-figure like Bush to protect them against the Big Bad Terrorists plotting against our way of life. Bush said that the terrorists hated us for our freedom, and he is right. But the problem is that after making that statement, he proceeded to make attacks against our freedoms, including the freedom of speech, himself. This is the very sort of thing that the terrorists wanted him to do. Therefore, Bush has pronounced judgement on himself – the fact that the terrorists hate us for our freedoms and the fact that Bush has engaged in systematic attacks on our freedoms means that by his own standards, he is aiding and abetting the terrorists and killers.
Mill points out that silencing our freedoms is like robbing the human race. The problem is that it deprives the human race of exchanging error for truth. Therefore, by his own standards, Bush is depriving himself of solidifying his standards and being able to prove them in the public sphere. If you are right about your opinions, then what are you afraid of when putting them on the line? Are you afraid they will be debunked?
The fact, as Mill points out, that you are silencing discussion means that you are assuming infallibility. But even in this case, even if you know you are infallible, what do you have to fear from people who are wrong? If a creation scientist comes on and claims that the world was created 7,000 years ago, all you need to do is show them the various forms of dating that have been shown to be accurate – some forms of dating have been shown to be accurate to billions of years back. And furthermore, you can point out that science is based on observation, that God has never been physically observed by anybody today, and that God’s existence or lack thereof is thus outside the realm of science.
This leads to an important area in the realm of free speech – does free speech occur in the private realm? Does a house owner have the right to expel some guest who repeatedly spouts Nazi slogans and drops his pants when confronted? Does a website owner have the right to regulate discussion on his or her blog, given that it is private property? Each site has different limits on what they allow and what they don’t. Every person has a right to decide what is worthy of discussion on their blog and what is not. And every person decides differently. Kos does not allow discussions on 9/11 tinfoil theories, Wayne Madsen, or Capitol Hill Blue writings. However, Booman Tribune and My Left Wing would. Therefore, just like you would not shout Nazi slogans at someone’s house, people should respect the wishes of the site owner when choosing a platform to air their views on. If Kos is wrong about these things, it should be his loss – not your or mine. Therefore, the best response to his rules is to discuss these things either here, at MLW, or at some site that specializes in such topics.
The fact is that Bush is accustomed to complete deference, very much similar to the aristocrats and kings that Mill was writing against. He refuses to accept any opinions other than his own in his inner circle. During the debates with John Kerry in 2004, he was clearly ill at ease when forced to confront a worldview different than his own. I have written elsewhere about how Bush constructs a world of fantasy, which explains why he believed Iraq would be such an easy victory. When people refuse to receive any views that are different from their own, this leads them into constructing fantasy realms in which the only views that matter are their own views and not anybody else’s.
And there is another fact that Bush ignores, pointed out by Mill. It never troubles Bush that he was placed here by chance and not in, say, China, India, or Africa. If he had, he would have grown up with a totally different set of assumptions. This totally exposes the absurdity of the fundamentalist notion that Jesus only saves those who believe in him. If that were the case, then people who lived halfway around the world at the time that Jesus died on the cross would never be saved. Why is it someone’s fault that they were placed in a part of the world where they never had a chance to hear about Jesus?
It could be argued that governments have judgement like the rest of us and that they would be totally acting against their own interests if they were to fail to regulate speech that acts against their interests. This, in fact, is what the Bush administration implies when they claim that peace activists are terrorists. Furthermore, the argument goes, it would be cowardice if as a result of the government’s best judgement to refuse to act on what is right. This is an argument used by fundamentalists to justify their rhetoric that we need to pass laws banning gay marriage and restoring school prayer.
But the problem, as pointed out by Mill, is that opinions cannot be proven right unless they can be given a chance to be debunked. So, therefore, the government is acting against their own interests in refusing to allow people a chance to defeat their own theories. The underlying assumption with such an argument is that people are too stupid to know what is going on and that they need a powerful leader who knows what is best for them. But since there is no proof that certain groups of people are inherently smarter than other groups of people, people who argue this have no case.
Furthermore, this argument assumes that people are not capable of correcting their own errors through discussion. It is true that many people are bullheaded and stubborn in persisting with their arguments long after their theories have been debunked and disproved. This, in fact, is why creation science and Intelligent Design still persist even in the face of all the evidence. The problem is that many other people are capable of seeing through these errors, while many others are bullheaded but will see through their errors through many years of discussion. The government cannot play god and assume that everybody is incapable of accepting error. This is a type of projection to assume that people are not capable of correcting their own errors.
It could also be argued, given what I have stated above, that government and private property are the same and that the government should have the same right to regulate speech as private individuals do in their own homes or in their own blogs. But the problem is that this is the very sort of thing that we revolted against when we declared independence against the British. The problem is that every individual is unique and has their own philosophy about what they want discussed in their own property or in their own blog or in their own forum. The government is a single organization whose purpose is to protect people and to ensure their well-being. There is a big difference between an individual deciding that questions about No Child Left Behind are off limits at a forum on Iraq and the government deciding what is and isn’t permissible speech.
Newtonian physics, as noted by Mill, was the prevalent scientific doctrine of the 19th century. But if it had not been permitted to be questioned, we would not have arrived at our understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics. We would not have acquired the new technology that you are using now as you are typing at your computer. And if relativity and Quantum Mechanics are not permitted to be questioned, how will we arrive at our next leap in our scientific understanding?
Finally, it can be argued that suppression of free speech in conjunction with establishment of beliefs is necessary to prop up society. This was what Cicero argued in his writings and this is what the Constitution Party and the dominionists argue. But the problem, as even Cicero admitted, was that these beliefs had no basis in reality, but on the whims of the people devising the belief systems. Therefore, such belief systems are only as good as the people making up the systems. Cicero in his Republic and Laws discusses several belief systems including those of the Persians and the Greeks and why they were devised the way they were.
And finally, when the belief systems devised are totally in error, such as those of the Roman Catholic Church in the Dark Ages, it takes hundreds of years for the errors in question to be discovered and corrected. People believed that disease was a result of God; therefore, they thought that the plagues were God’s will. Therefore, it did not occur to most people that the cause of the plague was due to natural causes rather than divine causes and that there were ways of minimizing the spread of the disease. This resulted in the deaths of around a third of Europe. This was the direct result of the faulty notion that the church was the proper guardian of knowledge and that people were too stupid to figure these things out for themselves.