There are a lot of reasons why Claudine Gay should never have been running Harvard, but her testimony before Congress isn’t one of them. I went back and watched as much of the hearing as I could stomach, and what I heard all three university presidents saying was: Anti-semitism is bad, but speech is different from action.
I guess I shouldn’t be a university president either because I agree: Anti-semitism is bad, and speech is different from action.
I’m on board with Justice Hugo Black’s definition of freedom of speech, which I think is the best ever offered:
Without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts, or whereases, freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they express, or the words they speak or write.
And I’m on board with John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech, which I also think is the best ever offered:
If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
I was hoping that one of the university presidents would ask Elise Stefanik to point to the particular passage in the Harvard, Penn, or MIT code of conduct that she thinks forbids someone from saying something because someone else finds it hurtful, hateful, horrible, or heinous.
In defense of the idea of making people simply shut up about certain subjects, I frequently hear the old and inaccurate claim that ‘you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater.’
In fact, you can do that, and we know that you can because Penn Jillette does it during every Penn & Teller show. It’s not a problem because no one does anything about it. The audience doesn’t get up and stampede out of the theater.
You can yell it, even if there’s no fire, so long as nothing bad happens as a result. There’s no criminal punishment for the speech itself. If significant damage occurs as a result, there may be civil liability. But that’s not a free speech issue. That’s a tort issue.
But if you think there are some ideas that are just too awful to allow people to express them, here’s a question you might ask yourself:
How many times would you have to hear someone call for the eradication of a nation… or for any other action that you currently find reprehensible… before you would actually engage in it?
There’s no number high enough, is there? People could speak to you all day about the most heinous ideas, but in the end, it’s just air being pushed around (or marks being made on paper).
So speech isn’t really the problem, is it?
Calling for something is speech, and being able to call for it without being punished is free speech. In contrast, actually doing the thing is not speech, free or otherwise. We lose sight of that at our peril.
And the way we lose sight of it is for individuals to think: Sure, I can resist bad ideas, but other people are too stupid to.
Calling for the eradication of Israel is speech. Parachuting into a music festival in Israel and killing hundreds of people is not speech. Launching rockets into downtown Tel Aviv is not speech. Detonating a suicide bomb on a bus in Jerusalem is not speech.
Is this not clear?
If you think someone is wrong, the proper response is to explain why he’s wrong, not to silence him.
Once we decide that ‘calling for the eradication of a nation’ is out of bounds, it’s a short step to saying that ‘calling for the elimination of our democracy’ should be out of bounds, and for many people, that’s the same as supporting Donald Trump.
Is this really a road we want to go down? I agree with Black and Mill that it is not.
Speech is speech and not action. Action is action and not speech. Blurring the line between the two is a ‘cure’ that is orders of magnitude worse, in the long run, than any ‘disease’ that it might be thought to cure in the short run.
Not too long ago someone was convicted and imprisoned for telling someone else to kill himself. It’s worth asking yourself who you would say was responsible there? The person who just said some words? Who expressed an opinion? Or the person who decided to end his own life and then actually ended it?
If a person is so impressionable that simply being told to do something will override his critical faculties about whether to actually do that thing, perhaps that person should be a ward of the state, and kept 24/7 in an environment where what he sees and hears is carefully and completely controlled. (And he certainly shouldn’t be allowed to vote.)
Logically, the idea that some thoughts are too dangerous to be expressed by anyone because they may have the wrong effect on someone is identical to the idea that guns are too dangerous to be owned by anyone because someone might misuse them.
They’re both examples of Mark Twain’s characterization of censorship as telling a man he can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it.
Recall that the heart of the Bruen decision was that we should afford the Second Amendment the same levels of respect and deference that we accord the First Amendment.
You like gun control? Pushing for speech control is exactly how you get more of it.