Speech is NOT Violence
“A culture that allows the concept of 'safety' to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.” ― Greg Lukianoff
Like many of you, there were times growing up where other children were mean and said downright vicious things to me. This was before the age of safetyism, an age where children were encouraged to remember the age-old axiom: “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
As cliche as the phrase sounds, the sentiment represents a different way of viewing the world than is currently being proliferated in our public schools, universities, mainstream media, and cultural discourse.
Recent events have people rightfully concerned about divisions in our country and the lengths individuals will go to get their way. However, we should not allow elites, gatekeepers, or opinion-leaders to use the actions of a statistically insignificant portion of the population to further the notion that speech equates to violence and therefore warrants restriction. After-all, the ability to engage in speech freely was deemed so critical by our founders that it was explicitly protected in the First Amendment.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business, puts it well: “The conflation of words with violence is not a new or progressive idea invented on college campuses in the last two years. It is an ancient and regressive idea. Americans should all be troubled that it is becoming popular again.”
And yet it is becoming more popular every day. According to a Pew Research Center Poll in July of 2020, “about half of Americans (53%) say it’s more important for people to be able to feel welcome and safe online, compared with 45% who believe it’s more important for people to be able to speak their minds freely.”
Make no mistake. I do not mean to say that some speech cannot be terrible or hurtful. But more terrifying is imagining a United States of America in which our rights are increasingly at the whim of public opinion, rather than being defined by the timeless principles codified in our Constitution. And once we start down the path of deciding that some speech is so harmful, injurious, or damaging that it warrants regulation or prohibition, that is exactly where we are headed.
We have reached a tipping point where senior journalists such as CNN’s Eliott McLaughlin find it fashionable to tweet: "Hate and lies flooded social media ahead of the Capitol siege. Is it time for America to rethink its absolutist interpretations of the First Amendment and its defense of extremist speech?”
Freedom of speech is messy, but it is essential. Democratic government works better when people feel at liberty to explore and discuss new ideas with others who may or may not agree with them.
Because speech online is often impersonal and can involve people who have no previously established relationship or repertoire, it is easy for individuals engaging in a debate online to intentionally take comments or arguments out of context and wield them as a partisan battering ram against their ideological opponents. These “social justice warriors” (SJWs) spend massive amounts of time sifting through past statements of people they disagree with in hope of finding problematic verbiage they can use to discredit their opponents.
All too frequently, these SJWs go too far and cause irreparable damage to the individuals they assail by insisting they be censored, de-platformed, and in some cases even getting them fired from their place of employment. This is not to argue that individuals should never face consequences for what they say, but instead that mobs should not form to demand immediate action on so-called "violent" speech.
As society conflates speech with violence at a faster pace, more viewpoints will be censored online with applause from the masses as they engage in their new blood sport. You may feel that your views are mainstream enough that you aren’t in any danger, but censorship is a slippery slope that could eventually harm all of us if we are not vigilant.
“It is unreasonable to imagine that printers agree with everything they print. It is likewise unreasonable, what some assert, that they ought not print anything other than what they approve, since then an end would thereby be put to free writing and the world would have nothing to read but what happened to be the opinions of printers.” - Ben Franklin
The more things change, the less they change. The technology for publishing our political beliefs might be different than they were at our nation’s founding, but that doesn’t make the expression of our views any less important.
It is time for everyday Americans to take a stand against the notion that speech is violence and fight to preserve our ability to communicate and debate in the public square.
