Why Free Speech Matters, and is Absolute

elomis:

Some animals have developed amazing ranges of expressions which allow them to project how they think and feel, but humans are the only animals to have developed something quite so absolutely descriptive as speech.  It’s not universal though; I can understand those who communicate in English, German and French but human animals which communicate in Farsi do it beyond my range of understanding.  Despite how non-universal human speech is, there is still nothing in the universe so descriptive as human speech.  We export understanding of our thoughts, our feelings, our actual existence, a million times better than any other animal.

This is why the concept of free speech matters.  Before I go on I regrettably need to define that term.

Free speech means the ability to say anything.  Free speech is to use that human animal expression mechanism free of any caveats.  Free speech is not the ability to use speech which is inoffensive,  it is not liberty to express speech which fits within any particular social, religious or even legal norm.  Free speech is not responsible speech, or morally correct speech, or the speech which makes you feel good and like there is consensus and love and inclusion.  Free speech is absolute.

Free speech might vilify.  It may be lies.  IT MAY BE PAGES OF LIES.  It may hatefully describe other humans and it might do so without any justification; on the basis of race, and religion, and gender, or sexuality.  It may have an agenda.  It might be bile-laden vitriol dropped from a great height on people who don’t deserve it.  Free speech can be one of the most horrible things that you’ve ever encountered.  It can be partisan, and sneaky, and hateful, and illegal, and wrong.

But it’s free.

The thing about free speech is that despite those bad things, it’s STILL that human-unique ability to express one’s thoughts, beliefs and feelings in articulate sounds.  The minute you say “but” to anything regarding free speech you are putting caveats on someone’s thoughts and essence.  

It’s easy to support free speech when those thoughts and beliefs are the same as yours, or pleasant, or morally right.  The real test - and the value of free speech if it has any at all - is when the speech is not pleasant.   The test is when it’s wrong.  The point where you know that you are on the side of freedom is when you support the right of somebody to vilify race, religion, gender, political persuasion and the facts.  You may rightfully support the consequences of that speech; legal consequences around damaging character, or causing physical injury, or gaining advantage, but you support the expression of belief via articulate noises.

So given all that, here’s how you know you don’t support freedom;

• When you say “free speech doesn’t mean you can say anything” when that is exactly what it means
• When you say “free speech except for hate media”
• When you say “free speech but for when the French/Israel/basketball players/women/gays/Aboriginals/journalists/cows are vilified”
• When you say “free speech unless it crosses the line”
• When you say “free speech up until the limit, because even free speech has limits”
• When you support the establishment of a body to regulate speech
• When you support the establishment of a license to speak, or support a political party that does, knowing that a license is permission and exists only to provide the option to revoke it

When your position is anything other than “I may not agree, they may even be wrong, but I support the right of that other human to translate their beliefs, feelings and essence into a conveyable format, because if I don’t I’m just making excuses for putting caveats on their worth as a human.”

I support actual freedom of speech.  Do you?  I won’t restrict your answer, but I will point out that a single word will do.

I believe in free speech.

Society of Modest Members

• David Bushby
• Kelly O’Dwyer
• Jamie Briggs
• Scott Ryan
• Simon Birmingham
• Michaelia Cash
• Brett Mason
• Mathias Cormann
• Mitch Fifield
• Alex Hawke

‘PEOPLE NOT PROFITS’ is backwards

fuckyeahemergence:

People not profits.  This slogan tells us that grasping avaricious corporations focus too monomaniacally on their bottom lines, and in so doing cause terrible harm.  What’s needed, it continues, is a focus on people – individual, quirky, imperfect, sometimes needy, sometimes secure: the building blocks of society, too complex to be reduced to an aggregated figure in a sales spreadsheet.  A compassionate, humane focus on these people and their needs and wants is the right way forward, not a fetishistically numerological obsession with bank balances and market tickers.

I think it’s a horrible idea.  Lemme ‘splain.

The main problem is that focusing on people doesn’t always — or even often – mean acting benevolently towards them.  Humans are full of nasty misanthropic tendencies ranging from intergroup bias to collective narcissism to simple sadism.  There’s every reason to believe that, if we focus on people, we will do terrible things to them.  (The historic record is particularly convincing in this regard.)

Even without resorting to sadism, people-focus can end up hurting more than it helps.  If I’m a baker at the end of a long day, I might reasonably decide to spend the rest of the evening with my family — people I care strongly about and who care strongly about me.  If this means that I don’t bake a loaf of bread for you, and you go hungry… well, that sucks for you.

Now say it with me, kids:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Focus on profit, and all of a sudden it makes a bit more sense to bake that last batch of loaves; to stock enough bread that no paying customer need be turned away.

Furthermore, focus on profit, and you add incentives for people to be — not necessarily friendly, but at least accommodating – towards those they’d otherwise dislike.  As Eric Crampton and David Henderson point out, racism is often too expensive to be pervasively practiced by private concerns: widespread discriminatory regimes from Jim Crow laws to apartheid were mandated by the state… an institution which could put people before profits.

By contrast, here’s Voltaire:

Go into the London Stock Exchange—a more respectable place than many a court—and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker.

The incentive to make a profit convinces otherwise-antagonistic people to deal with — and, given the right institutional infrastructure, actually to trust – each other.  That’s powerful stuff.

But suppose we were able to perfect human nature to the degree required by statism and come up with a sufficiently benevolent population to make “people not profits” turn out better than, say, North Korea.  Even then, “profit” would still outperform “people” as a guiding motivation.

Here’s the next problem: We people don’t actually know what other people want.  (We have a hard enough time figuring out what we want.)  If I’m a baker, I’m unlikely to know ahead of time how much you want a loaf of bread compared to a bag of croissants or a box of donuts.  It’s unlikely that I’ll have the time or the resources to bake all of them for you, and for everyone else who steps into my shop.  Maybe I’m really concerned about other people’s health, and I stop baking donuts and other fattening confections; conversely, maybe I get great satisfaction out of the joyful smiles of people who bite into my delicious donuts, and I stop baking whole-wheat bread.

But if I want to make as much profit as I can, I need to be very concerned with the prices I charge.  These prices will inform the inputs I buy and the products I sell, and will tell me what my customers want and how much they want it.  My suppliers can tell me how hard it is to produce flour, or mixers, or butter, simply by varying their prices, and I can do the same to so inform my customers.  Note that simply having a price system isn’t enough: people have to care about profits in order to make full use of the information those prices carry.  Care enough, even, to put those profits ahead of other people who aren’t willing to pay for a product but want it anyway.

(via whakatikatika)

Why the liberal right should embrace the ideas behind identity politics

A while ago I was having a conversation with a researcher for a classical liberal think tank about classical liberal feminism. In a lot of ways, at face value, it seems the two aren’t compatible, especially given modern feminism’s focus on state power as the solution to the problems feminism seeks to solve. Classical liberal feminism, to explain briefly, says that legal (i.e. coercive) impediments to women’s liberation are more or less eradicated in the western world, and that the problems which remain are ones of social attitudes, which can only be rectified through non-coercive (non-statist) means.

To extend the example of feminism, by ‘identity politics’ I essentially mean the recognition that power is shaped and influenced by factors unique to each individual, in particular identity markers such as gender, colour, sexuality and ability. And to an extent the causes taken up by those who champion identity politics are statist, but that is by no means an inherent quality of the discourse of identity itself. I think it’s quite compatible with state-sceptic political ideologies. Right-state scepticism is individualistic in nature, so the idea that not everyone experiences power in society in the same way should not be a radical concept.

Firstly, liberalism is about autonomy. That seems rather obvious. When it comes to matters of coercion, autonomy means nothing more than negative liberties, the freedom to be left alone and not interfered with by the state or another private citizen. But that doesn’t mean that all adherents to liberal philosophy are, or should be, content to remove themselves from civil society with no concern for voluntary institutions and culture. It is a mistake to think that government is the only source of oppression, though historically it has been the source of much of it. Instead, liberals could aim to achieve what was dubbed over at Reason as a “culture of liberty”, where, within a minarchist or limited state, culture and civil society intertwine to fulfil those functions - voluntarily - which we believe to be not the jurisdiction of the state. There are a couple of ways in which this manifests - the philosophical underpinnings of the ‘voluntary’ state as espoused by Philip Blond and his Red Toryism (though in practice it becomes more akin to social engineering than most liberty-lovers would like) and then what many establishment libertarians have referred to as ‘libertine’ society, in which dominant culture is subverted and changed through voluntary collectivist involvement in social change - things like feminism, anti-racism, the queer movement etc.

Since I used the ‘c’ word (collectivism), there’s a valid question as to what distinguishes this approach from progressive leftism and left-libertarianism. Plenty of people call me a progressive because I embrace pretty much all of what I’ve listed above, but I prefer ‘liberal’ because progressivism is statist. The progressive left call themselves that because they believe that the government has an integral role to play in liberating society from both the perils of moral conservatism and also the pitfalls of capitalism. All jabs at the left aside, in that sense alone I suppose you could call them more radical. Now, as I’ve took pains to establish, the type of social change I envisage libertarians adopting is entirely voluntarily, evolutionary, organic, with any collective action being a means to an end. A limited interpretation of the use of non-statist collectivism is also what distinguishes this approach to liberal rightism from left-libertarianism, as private property is more or less the First Commandment of being on the liberal right and that’s not the case with the more communitarian approach to resources, property and wealth from the left-libertarians.

Generally, people on the liberal right advocate limited government for two reasons - one is that the natural state of mankind is freedom, and as such coercion is morally abhorrent, and the second is that limited government, rule of law, property rights etc create the best kind of society. Natural rights theorists probably won’t put too much stock in what I’ve been saying in this post anyway, but for consequentialist/utilitarian liberals, being able to defend limited government as the best principle upon which to organise society is a necessity. And generally, those defences rest upon the idea that voluntary, spontaneous organisation solves problems better than a centrally organised unit does. Hayek’s written some absolutely amazing stuff on the knowledge problem and spontaneous order which goes into more detail. But while Hayek writes in the context of economics and distribution of resources, the same principle can be applied to social movements and social change. Consider that the most famous struggles for freedom took place in opposition to an encroaching state. And on a somewhat topical note, the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Czechoslovakia, in which the late Vaclav Havel played a huge role. The essential point here is that social movements and culture are types of spontaneous order that resist planned systems. A civil society that is able to solve its problems does not need a state to fix them.

Which brings me to why I think the liberal right should embrace social movements: they strengthen the case for liberty. I was recently given the heads-up on a debate within libertarianism on issues virtually identical to what I’ve written about here, about thick vs. thin libertarianism, and the existence of paleolibertarianism, which combines state-scepticism with a kind of cultural conservatism that is antithetical to my arguments. Culturally-conservative libertarians, while no more or less libertarian than those like myself, I feel are really only fighting half the battle that purveyors of limited government have taken up arms in. There’s more detail on that in the article linked in this post, but the general argument is that “not every threat to liberty is backed by a government gun.” Oppressive social practices are also a threat to liberty, though it’s arguable that conforming to them is more of a choice (in the sense that there is no coercion) than conforming to government legislation. Nevertheless, just because they happen to be more of a ‘choice’ doesn’t mean that fighting social oppression isn’t worthwhile, it just means that it has to be tackled in a way that doesn’t involve the state.