Hating Free Speech

The alt-left has long been at war against free speech. It wants to shut down Fox News and any other media outlets, even bloggers whose opinions it deems offensive. People who were proclaiming themselves to be champions of facts have long since been trying to monopolize the marketplace of ideas. They insist that differing opinions, disagreements, even offensive remarks must be banned, their speakers consigned to oblivion.

Before examining the debate incited by Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett through a New York Times article, it is worth underscoring that the only speech that Barrett and the alt-left legions want to suppress comes from the right. In particular, they seem to be horrified at the negative effects produced by professional provocateur and best-selling author Milo Yiannopoulos.

If you hold to the politically correct dogmas of the alt-left, if you are a leftist extremist fawning over Hugo Chavez, bowing down to the image of Chairman Mao, honoring convicted murderers like Joanne Chesimard and Rasmea Odeh you can say anything you damn well please. The armies of the alt-left will defend you to the death. 

But if you are a gay Jewish British conservative like Milo your speech must be suppressed, lest it stress out thin-skinned students and hurt their delicate feelings. Barrett argues, with a special lack of cogency, that any speech that hurts your feelings and that detracts from your mental health is an act of violence. And what does she feel about the “evil eye?” Should we outlaw envious looks too.

Before proceeding into the tall grass of Barrett’s defective reasoning, we should note the salient philosophical issue. The alt left does not believe in reality. It believes in uniform opinion, in one mindedness, closed to all ideas that might undermine the faith of those who believe what they have been told to believe, without regard for fact or evidence.

The error is almost too easy to understand. If we see a cat lying on a mat we will all agree that the cat is on the mat. Faced with an objective reality we agree to its truth. And we all say that the cat is on the mat.

And yet, is the fact a fact because we all believe it? Does belief make the fact a fact? (See the current mania over transgenderism, here.) I don’t think so. Thus, the error in alt left thinking consists in imagining that if we can all agree and say that a rat is on the mat, this becomes the truth, even if the rat is nowhere to be seen-- because the cat just ate the rat. 

You might consider the statement that the rat is on the mat to be a higher truth, a truth referring to a world produced  by your wishes—where dreams come true. But, to imagine that if we can convince everyone to accept as a fact that the rat is on the mat then the rat will be on the mat… is a fundamental error.

It’s like saying that everyone agrees and says that Shakespeare was a great writer. But then, you add that what makes Shakespeare great is that everyone agrees he was great. If the world did not think that Hamlet was great play it would not be a great play. Thus, those who would want to control your mind explain that if we can somehow convince everyone, from the media to the academy, that your neighbor down the street, a hack poetaster if ever there was one, is a great writer, then, presto, your neighbor becomes a great writer.

To produce this new reality and to effect this magical transformation you will need to ban all speech that speaks ill of your neighbor's literary talents, because otherwise your neighbor and anyone who accepts the belief as truth will be seriously traumatized. After all, if you have bought into a series of lies, if you have based your life on them, you certainly do not want to hear anyone tell you that you are wrong. Between changing your mind and shutting down the discordant speech, you will choose the latter. If you are hearing echoes of the Hans Christian Anderson story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” you have gotten the point.

Meanwhile, back with Professor Barrett’s efforts to undermine the First amendment, Jesse Singal  summarizes her position in New York Magazine:

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, explains that “scientifically speaking,” the idea that physical violence is more harmful than emotional violence is an oversimplification. “Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain — even kill neurons— and shorten your life.” Chronic stress can also shrink your telomeres, she writes — “little packets of genetic material that sit on the ends of your chromosomes” — bringing you closer to death.

Singal offers up a few words from Barrett’s op-ed:

The scientific findings I described above provide empirical guidance for which kinds of controversial speech should and shouldn’t be acceptable on campus and in civil society. In short, the answer depends on whether the speech is abusive or merely offensive.

Offensiveness is not bad for your body and brain. Your nervous system evolved to withstand periodic bouts of stress, such as fleeing from a tiger, taking a punch or encountering an odious idea in a university lecture.

Barrett bemoans the fact the being subjected to so much stress is bad for your nervous system. One might say that the nightly news causes an equal or greater degree of stress, but the alt left will then decide that it needs to start policing the nightly news… the better to shut down all conservative ideas.

Barrett continues:

What’s bad for your nervous system, in contrast, are long stretches of simmering stress. If you spend a lot of time in a harsh environment worrying about your safety, that’s the kind of stress that brings on illness and remodels your brain. That’s also true of a political climate in which groups of people endlessly hurl hateful words at one another, and of rampant bullying in school or on social media. A culture of constant, casual brutality is toxic to the body, and we suffer for it.

That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.

Since no one seems to notice this, but these arguments always assume that people who do not toe the academic party line are hatemongers. One way that the alt left has tried to suppress inconvenient speech is to call it hate speech. But this has been going on for quite some time now.

Happily, Singal refutes Barrett’s ideas clearly and cogently. To his mind she has confused the chronic stress suffered by people who grow up poor with the stress experienced by a college student who has been subjected to microaggressions, that is, to remarks that might be interpreted negatively. As you know, the alt left wants to explain the academic underperformance of certain groups by the fact that other students look at them cross-eyed. Its blame shifting and a rationalization for failure.

Singal writes:

Setting aside the fact that no one will ever be able to agree on what’s “abusive” versus what’s “merely offensive,” the articles Barrett links to are mostly about chronic stress — the stress elicited by, for example, spending one’s childhood in an impoverished environment of serious neglect and violence. Growing up in a dangerous neighborhood with a poor single mother who has to work so much she doesn’t have time to nurture you is not the same as being a college student at a campus where Yiannopoulos is coming to speak, and where you are free to ignore him or to protest his presence there. One situation involves a level of chronic stress that is inflicted on you against your will and which really could harm you in the long run; the other doesn’t. 

Perhaps, more importantly, research shows that you can sensitize people to react badly to certain kinds of speech. If you tell students that their college careers are being sabotaged by Milo, no matter what he says, they will feel that his words are traumatizing them.

Singal continues:

It’s also worth pointing out that this sort of scaremongering — Milo is coming and he is shrinking your telomeres! — could become a self-fulfilling prophecy for some students. There’s an intriguing area of behavioral science known as mind-set research, and one of its tenets is that the relationship between stress and humans’ response to it is partially mediated by how people expect stress to affect them.

And also,

Now, it would be just as much of a stretch to say that a single column like Barrett’s could cause students to self-traumatize as it would be to say that an upcoming Yiannopoulos appearance could traumatize them. But in the aggregate, if you tell students over and over and over that certain variants of free speech — variants which are ugly, but which are aired every moment of every day on talk radio — are traumatizing them, it really could do harm. And there’s no reason to go down this road, because there’s no evidence that the mere presence of a conservative speaker on campus is harming students in some deep psychological or physiological way (with the exception of outlying cases involving preexisting mental-health problems). This is a silly idea that should be retired from the conversation about free speech on campus.

Kudos to Jesse Singal for a cogent and lucid take down of a pseudoscientific argument designed to take away your free speech.