Free speech - a pandemic's work

[Diamond]

I wrote up a very long piece on free speech during the pandemic. If you can bear to tackle 20k words, I would very much appreciate feedback from the good people of urban75.

The piece attempts to construct a new model of free speech and looks at 4 phenomena - (i) campus no-platforming, (ii) cancellation, (iii) social media bans and (iv) regulation-as-a-solution. To build the model, I rely heavily on a vertical/horizontal distinction in speech practice.

Why might you be interested in reading it?

Well, I've been reading these boards since at least 1998 and, in a general and unreferenced sense, they form the single most important resource for this paper. Almost all of the insights in this paper (should anyone actually consider them to be) are urban75 insights. Once you read it, you'll see what I'm getting at.

What's in it? Well, I'm a historian and a lawyer by training so it draws quite heavily on history, legal theory, and political theory. But its other major theme is poetry, which I use to explore the quality of expression and truth - in fact, I am drafting a cycle of sonnets on epistemological matters to include in a later draft of the text. The north star for the whole thing was readability though - I've prioritised that above many other things so hopefully it should be reasonably interesting and not too much of a slog.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

Just thought I'd let you know I'm looking at this. I'd hate you to think after all your hard work that no-one was interested. I've skimmed your document once and am now re-reading at a more leisurely pace. Looks interesting.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

One aspect of your piece which I'm uncomfortable with is your usage of thought experiments, e.g. the Glade and Pool Hall. They are reminiscent of various Social Contract theories. I get the idea behind it, and maybe in some senses it's unavoidable, but such constructs are always ahistorical and as such a bad starting point. If you begin with things that never happened you will miss various aspects of reality, which do happen in the world as we know it.

There are limits on our free speech which are imposed by authority and power at a level way below Phil the Greek. Parents have a huge impact on children's levels of articulacy and freedom to express themselves, which gradually diminishes with age. Teachers in schools have a direct and pretty absolute power to restrict their students right to speak freely, if the teachers choose to enforce their privilege. Employers restrict their employees rights to free speech without even trying, as the fear of discipline or losing your job imposes a prohibition on certain topics of speech and conversation which few challenge.

A couple of other observations, for now. We have no real idea how free humans were to express themselves before literacy, and indeed before agriculture. We do know that nomadic hunter gatherers had the intellectual powers needed to create works of art and construct temples and the like, so can presume that philosophical and political concepts were not entirely absent from their lives. At what level we can only guess. Our caricature image of American Indian nomads is probably overly romantic, but it may well be that freedom of speech was a near universal once upon a time, with individuals or groups always at liberty to go their own ways. (Or maybe not).

Your idea of tolerance seems to be derived mainly from European religious thought. I'm sure your mate Theodoric would have been less tolerant of political revolutionaries than religious dissidents. Treason was a punishable offence in most European countries and polities long before widespread literacy.

As an aside, your presumption of almost instinctive conflict between nomadic and sedentary societies may be true to an extent after the domestication of the horse in Eurasia, but doesn't necessarily hold up to scrutiny elsewhere in the world.

That's all for now.

 

[Diamond]

Thanks v much for the thoughts. Will have a think and respond more fully subsequently..

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

Personally I've at times been ambivalent about 'no platform for fascists'. Back in the 1970's when the phrase was first used I had not long since read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and encountered Stalin's idea of Trotsky-fascists. Once you state that such and such a group is not entitled to express their views you run the risk that people who are not e.g. fascist will be labelled as such. Or racist, or sexist, or whatever. I'm not so ambivalent nowadays. Real fascists don't just stop at words, and even their words can be intimidatory or frightening.

But even fascists should be able to express their views about the opening hours of the library, or where a new zebra crossing should be situated.

 

[Diamond]

One aspect of your piece which I'm uncomfortable with is your usage of thought experiments, e.g. the Glade and Pool Hall. They are reminiscent of various Social Contract theories. I get the idea behind it, and maybe in some senses it's unavoidable, but such constructs are always ahistorical and as such a bad starting point. If you begin with things that never happened you will miss various aspects of reality, which do happen in the world as we know it.

There are limits on our free speech which are imposed by authority and power at a level way below Phil the Greek. Parents have a huge impact on children's levels of articulacy and freedom to express themselves, which gradually diminishes with age. Teachers in schools have a direct and pretty absolute power to restrict their students right to speak freely, if the teachers choose to enforce their privilege. Employers restrict their employees rights to free speech without even trying, as the fear of discipline or losing your job imposes a prohibition on certain topics of speech and conversation which few challenge.

A couple of other observations, for now. We have no real idea how free humans were to express themselves before literacy, and indeed before agriculture. We do know that nomadic hunter gatherers had the intellectual powers needed to create works of art and construct temples and the like, so can presume that philosophical and political concepts were not entirely absent from their lives. At what level we can only guess. Our caricature image of American Indian nomads is probably overly romantic, but it may well be that freedom of speech was a near universal once upon a time, with individuals or groups always at liberty to go their own ways. (Or maybe not).

Your idea of tolerance seems to be derived mainly from European religious thought. I'm sure your mate Theodoric would have been less tolerant of political revolutionaries than religious dissidents. Treason was a punishable offence in most European countries and polities long before widespread literacy.

As an aside, your presumption of almost instinctive conflict between nomadic and sedentary societies may be true to an extent after the domestication of the horse in Eurasia, but doesn't necessarily hold up to scrutiny elsewhere in the world.

That's all for now.

Yeah, I hear you on the thought experiment stuff. It was the only way to explore some of the essential characteristics of social agreement though. What I was trying to get at is what actually happens when people come together and unite in a political sense. Much of what I say on social media/state formation links into that idea of how people unite through speech.

Incidentally, as an aside - I do put the boot in on social media platforms re: conditioning people to norms of tyranny as a consequence of their UI/UX and governance but urban75 is not in scope of that criticism for various reasons that should be fairly obvious.

On the examples you bring up - teachers would fall for vertical analysis as an emanation of the state so there are real free speech issues there (where it is a state school, not so a private school). A horizontal analysis may also operate alongside that.

By contrast, with employers and parents, there are no vertical issues and therefore no free speech issues at all. Instead, these are horizontal games of speech discipline, breaches of which lead to reciprocal social punishment, some of which is legal (e.g. losing your job and/or being done for harassment), most of which is customary (e.g. parental enforcement of discipline/being shunned).

I think we share similar thoughts on the idea of primitive free speech. My suspicion (beyond Theodoric largely evidence free) is that nomadic conditions are more amenable to toleration and freedom of speech than pastoral conditions. And, further, that the European tradition of liberal tolerance flows from the warrior nomads of the steppe rather than the highly repressive societies of the settled ancient world; the warrior nomads almost always being tribal con-federations that were, each time, only recently united from disparate tribes on the steppe prior to their invasions of Europe. This is reinforced by personal experience of how much more open people tend to be on the road than when at home.

That's a fair point on Eurasia but, if we're being honest and if we take a wide definition of the place, it really is the main event from a long history pov.

 

[Diamond]

Personally I've at times been ambivalent about 'no platform for fascists'. Back in the 1970's when the phrase was first used I had not long since read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and encountered Stalin's idea of Trotsky-fascists. Once you state that such and such a group is not entitled to express their views you run the risk that people who are not e.g. fascist will be labelled as such. Or racist, or sexist, or whatever. I'm not so ambivalent nowadays. Real fascists don't just stop at words, and even their words can be intimidatory or frightening.

But even fascists should be able to express their views about the opening hours of the library, or where a new zebra crossing should be situated.

I have to say that after all the reading that I did for this piece, I was thoroughly convinced by the old school approach to free discussion that Milton advocates in the Areopagitica.

Truth rather than safety should be the paramount consideration for public life. Or to put it another way, "safety" per se is an illusion and that good things can only be obtained through a commitment to the truth, even if that appears to entail fierce disagreement.

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

I don't understand your differentiation between nomadic and pastoral. They can be one and the same thing. The first domestication of animals was probably done by nomads or semi-nomads and nomadic or seasonally nomadic pastoral practices continued into modern times and still occur in some parts of the world.

Kropotkin's "The State. It's Historic Role" argued very much in favour of the barbarian hordes as agin the Roman Empire, and here again I probably agree.

I'm not sure I quite get your distinction between vertical and horizontal as applied in the real world. The restriction of free speech in schools is exactly the same in private as in state schools. You may claim that the ultimate source of authority is different, but to the school pupil that is a constitutional nicety.

Similarly I fail to see the horizontal aspect in an employer/employee relationship. What if the employer is the state? Still true for many nowadays, true for most in the old USSR. Does the power relationship really alter when an industry is nationalised or re-nationalised? I don't think so.

 

[Diamond]

Well, there is quite a sharp distinction between nomadic peoples and pastoral peoples in Eurasia that has been characterised by conflict between the two since ancient times. I was quite heavily influenced by this By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia: Amazon.co.uk: Cunliffe, Barry: 9780199689170: Books, which is really fun, especially if you like a spot of archaeology. I also studied under Carole Hillenbrand at Edinburgh, who is quite keen on the nomad-pastoral conflict dynamic to help explain the spread of Islam.

Examples of nomad-pastoral conflict include the Bronze Age collapse, Sycthians v Greeks, Huns v Romans, Muslim Arabs v Byzantium/Sassanids, Xiongu v Han, Mongols v Song, Timurlane v just about anyone

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

Well, there is quite a sharp distinction between nomadic peoples and pastoral peoples in Eurasia that has been characterised by conflict between the two since ancient times. I was quite heavily influenced by this By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia: Amazon.co.uk: Cunliffe, Barry: 9780199689170: Books, which is really fun, especially if you like a spot of archaeology. I also studied under Carole Hillenbrand at Edinburgh, who is quite keen on the nomad-pastoral conflict dynamic to help explain the spread of Islam.

Examples of nomad-pastoral conflict include the Bronze Age collapse, Sycthians v Greeks, Huns v Romans, Muslim Arabs v Byzantium/Sassanids, Xiongu v Han, Mongols v Song, Timurlane v just about anyone

Is there more than one definition of pastoralism, then? I've understood it to mean the domestication and herding of animals, including sheep, cattle, reindeer and horses. Often such pastoralists are nomadic, or semi-nomadic. Conflict between nomadic and settled communities I quite understand.

 

[Diamond]

I don't understand your differentiation between nomadic and pastoral. They can be one and the same thing. The first domestication of animals was probably done by nomads or semi-nomads and nomadic or seasonally nomadic pastoral practices continued into modern times and still occur in some parts of the world.

Kropotkin's "The State. It's Historic Role" argued very much in favour of the barbarian hordes as agin the Roman Empire, and here again I probably agree.

I'm not sure I quite get your distinction between vertical and horizontal as applied in the real world. The restriction of free speech in schools is exactly the same in private as in state schools. You may claim that the ultimate source of authority is different, but to the school pupil that is a constitutional nicety.

Similarly I fail to see the horizontal aspect in an employer/employee relationship. What if the employer is the state? Still true for many nowadays, true for most in the old USSR. Does the power relationship really alter when an industry is nationalised or re-nationalised? I don't think so.

I rather care about "constitutional niceties" in this analysis as I am trying to excavate what rights, if any, do exist in law and custom around the practice of speech.

On the question of the school, one of the ways in which that would be relevant would be the rights available to the pupil. For instance, if this pupil was a committed evangelical Christian, it might be important for them to wear a cross. If the school then bans jewelry from its uniform code, as a number do, and if the school is a state school, the pupil might then have a cause of action against the school for restricting their free expression right. This would not be available to them in a private school.

Similar analysis on employment in state industries. They would automatically attract free expression issues, I would have thought. Not so privately.

It's important to realise though that the same conversation with the same person can involve both vertical issues and horizontal issues.

So, for instance, if this pupil goes to the headmaster's office to discuss the issue of them wearing the cross, that conversation will be fraught with (i) vertical risk for the headmaster/school (who may say or do something that breaches the pupil's free expression right, as exemplified by them wearing the cross) while also, simultaneously, engaging (ii) horizontal issues of law and custom, such as mandatory school rules that prohibit the pupil from using certain language and/or the importance to the pupil of keeping the headmaster/school sympathetic to them and their view more widely (downstream impact on status/exam results/recommendations).

 

[Kevbad the Bad]

It strikes me this distinction between state and non-state actors is too particular to individual states. France is a secular state, so too is Turkey - but with potentially very different interpretations of what that means at different times. The UK is not a theocratic state, but bits of it, e.g. England, have a state religion which is also linked in with the function of head of state. The USA and USSR are and were secular but with very different outcomes with regards to freedom of expression. You may find you have more rights to free religious expression in a theocratic state like Iran than in the old USSR, as long as you adhere to a limited list of permitted religions. Individual private schools may have their own rules and regs as well. And so far I've only talked about religion.

In practice those on the receiving end have very few rights. Some might like to think they have more rights to free expression in Western democracies, but only in so far as that right to free expression doesn't have too much actual impact on reality.

Sorry if this is a rather garbled post, but I'm in a bit of a hurry.

Cheers

 

[Pog de Maistre]

I'll take a read and give my thoughts. If you don't hear back from me by monday then feel free to ding me and remind me

 

[purves grundy]

Count me in.

 

[cyberpink]

Not about to read 20k with full attention now, but this is the kind of thinking I've been thinking, at a glance.
The shift politically is all about dishonesty and spiked media platforms. Funding or providing propaganda against a peoples is still an act of war.
Silence, from the powers that be when Vladimir is making coffee. I despise the word "cuck" but Boris is one.