I cannot emphasize enough the importance of comedy, satire, and parody to the whole process of experimenting with ideas. Today, students can get in trouble for making jokes (admittedly, sometimes the jokes aren’t funny), but even a bad joke can have a remarkable ability to get people talking about issues they would otherwise never have discussed and to draw conclusions they would otherwise never have reached. I suspect that many readers can think of genuine insights they have gained from the work of Woody Allen, Gary Shteyngart, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, or, for that matter, South Park, Seinfeld, or Curb Your Enthusiasm. These sources might even provide more real-life wisdom than anything we ever studied about Hegel, George Berkeley, Heidegger, or Foucault.
To be smarter, to be wiser, we need to accept the roaring rapids of information we now live in and learn to navigate them better. Colleges could be teaching us how to fully utilize today’s unprecedented flow of data, opinion, emotion, and art to make for a better, smarter world. Hiding from it, pushing it away, looking for some safe harbor free from challenge or pain will only result in more illiberal ideas and fewer students prepared to live in a breathtaking, chaotic, tumultuous world.
J. S. Mill and a Warning to Colleges
In his transformative work On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill brilliantly makes the case for maximizing human freedom for the benefit of all human-kind.27 His arguments regarding free speech are timeless and yet especially vital today. Mill pointed out that dissenting voices must be protected because of one simple fact: any of us might be wrong. But he also went several steps further, pointing out that open debate is useful even when we are right from the start. The process of open debate and discussion can refine your understanding of the issues and help you recognize in detail why you believe what you do. An opposing argument may hold some kernel of truth, and even if it doesn’t, it may deepen your understanding of your own beliefs.
Without free speech and discussion, people cling to their beliefs the same way people maintain prejudices, holding them to be true but not critically examining why, and never learning to defend them. The resulting inability to articulate why we may be right makes us even more emotional and hostile when anything questions our certainty. In Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that precious few college students knew how to argue or think critically and that they lacked the ability to argue more than one side of an issue. Students had a depressingly poor ability to “make an argument” and then “break an argument.”28
So what would Mill predict for a system that has fallen away from a culturally enshrined process of debate and discussion? He would expect a society in which people of different beliefs do not talk to each other, because doing so might harm their certainty about what they believe. He might guess that opposing camps would surround themselves only by media sources that reflect and reinforce their views, which was possible even in Mill’s day but is a thousand times easier today. He might argue that we would be unable to reach common ground, and we might even doubt that a common ground could be possible. He would predict that those in one camp might regard the name of the other camp as a dirty word, yet often be unable to describe the views of the other side (or, often, even their own side) very accurately. Does this sound familiar to anybody? It sounds like the America I live in. And it will continue to be this way if the institution that should be our best hope of remedying uncritical certainty—higher education—is only making the problem worse.
How the Road to Censorship Is Always Paved with Good Intentions
History may be the best weapon to overcome some of the most seductive and common arguments made these days to defend censorship. Probably the simplest but most successful argument for restrictions on speech I hear today is that censorship can protect people from hurtful or bigoted speech. The implicit question I run into all the time on campuses is, “Can’t censorship be acceptable if one’s intentions are pure, compassionate, and generally good?”
History tells us that the answer is flatly “no.” I cannot think of a single anti-free-speech movement in American history that did not sprout from someone believing that they were fighting for truth, justice, decency, and goodness itself. This is so common a friend of mine has an acronym for it: the “GIRA Effect,” standing for “Good Intentions Run Amok.” John Adams thought he was saving the country from ruin by instituting the Alien and Sedition Acts. Northerners who believed that abolitionists needed to be silenced thought they were preventing a bloody civil war. The Victorians who censored everything from the use of curse words to the merest mention of contraception assumed they were saving the nation’s soul. The communist-hunters of the two Red Scares thought they were guarding the nation from totalitarianism and, eventually, nuclear destruction.29
Having pure intentions, steadfast goals, and an unwillingness to consider that you might be wrong is the formula for some of the worst evils mankind has ever wrought upon one another, from inquisitions to the twentieth century’s disastrous experiments with totalitarian utopias. As pushy as those of us who defend civil liberties may seem, the right to freedom of speech and freedom of conscience rests on a deep-seated humility: I know I am not omniscient, and I suspect you aren’t either. Therefore, I have no right to tell you what you can’t say, certainly no right to tell you what you must say, and I wouldn’t even imagine telling you what you must think, believe, or hold in your heart.
Intentions matter little if you are still doing the wrong thing, and there is no need to genuflect to good ones. Prohibitions on hateful speech do nothing to stop hate, but they let resentments simmer, and they also prevent you from knowing who the hateful people even are. “I want to know which people in the room I should not turn my back to,” says FIRE cofounder Harvey Silverglate, who was raised Jewish, speaking about the principle of allowing anti-Semites or other bigots to express themselves. It may be very tempting for high school students entering college to have sympathy for the advocates of speech codes, but that is only because they misunderstand the purpose of the First Amendment and lack knowledge of the legal, philosophical, and historical principles that support it. The First Amendment exists to protect minority points of view in a democracy, and anything that undermines it necessarily gives more power to the authorities. It is ultimately the best protection of the weak, the unpopular, the oddballs, the misfits, and the underdogs. If the only price that we have to pay for this freedom is that we sometimes hear words that we find offensive, it is well worth it.
Another historical fact that students need to know is that just because we have a First Amendment doesn’t mean that the country has always enjoyed or will always enjoy robust protections of expression. People are often surprised to discover that prior to 1925, the First Amendment was considered to bind only the federal government, and even then it was interpreted so weakly as to have little practical effect. But in a line of cases extending from the 1925 decision in Gitlow v. New York to the present, the Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment as strongly protecting political dissent, satire, and parody—the very types of speech that are most often attacked on campuses.30 Free speech, therefore, has not always been the rule, and we should not assume it will always remain the rule.
The Acceptance of Censorship by College Students
That most students don’t care a great deal about freedom of speech and sometimes are even hostile to it has been evident in case after case at FIRE. Here are just a few cases where you might think students would have risen up in outrage, but they didn’t.
A student at Auburn University was told by the administration in late 2011 that he could not put a Ron Paul banner in his window.31 When the student pointed out that other students had been allowed to put up banners, the university claimed (like they typically do) that this policy had always been in place—even though it was only being enforced, coincidentally, against this particular student. While the student continued to produce evidence that Auburn was not enforcing this policy against other students, the attempt to prevent him from engaging in the election process was met by an eerie silence on campus,