In my view,
speech should be anything but free. Bad speech, false speech, belligerent
speech along with felicitous speech, informative speech, and inspiring speech should
all carry a price, sometimes paying out and sometimes cashing in, with a full
range of well-modulated possibilities in between. Viewing speech as some privileged
human activity that we must cordon off and protect from reprisals is one factor
contributing to its corruption. Speech is one of many ways a person transacts with
other people. People learn to use their power of speech best when those
transactions are allowed their natural consequences. Speech is consequential like
J. L. Austin taught in his seminal, How to Do Things with Words. Doing crime
with speech, things like theft, murder and injury should be punished with law.
But everything else, including creating hate, should be regulated with societal norms,
dirty looks, lost employment, and exclusion from certain fellowships. Like most things, the
quality of speech generally improves when governmental involvement is minimized
and people, through the pursuit of self-interest are allowed to discover that
truth tellers and honest brokers are of greater value than charlatans and grand
standers. The market has a way of rewarding those with well-conceived
self-interests while extinguishing those without. But what is this market and
what are its rules? The goal of every
society is to effectively project itself into the future. Just like life wills
its own survival and uses sexual reproduction as the means to project into the
future, so does society will its own continuity and projects itself into the future
through raising members that will maintain that society into the future. Sexual
reproduction faithfully replicates organisms with the added benefit of allowing
for variations on a theme. The exploratory evolutionary nature of this
biological process is enhanced many times when it leaves the tightly regulated
realm of nature where the basic elements of success revolve around food, sex,
territory, and predation, and move to the relatively formless realm of ideas
where most anything is possible. But not everything. Genes as units of
biological information have very few successful radiations that improve on what
is. Memes as units of cultural information have many more possibilities that
might work but here too, not everything we wish to be true culturally, actually
works to move a society effectively into the future. Broadly speaking, cultural strategies break
into two camps: liberals who wish to challenge accepted constraints and
conservatives who wish to preserve them. In the realm of sexuality, liberal
forces explore new ways of mating which almost by definition cannot improve on
nature’s tried and true method of mating males with females to produce
offspring. However, the production of cultural offspring requires less genetic
continuity and more memetic continuity, and so different strategies of cradle
robbing ensue. Brood parasites like the common cuckoo move their eggs to an
unsuspecting nest. They forage and fornicate freely while others invest in
child rearing for them. In the realm of human society biology plays less of a
role than cultural mimesis. Here, taking advantage of the long-term,
painstaking investments made by biological parents and then
converting those offspring to a different cultural project can be an extremely
successful strategy. Cultural projection is gained without the high price and narrow
margins of biological investments. Speech is the
essential human realm where memes supplant genes in importance. I am much more
defined by my beliefs and mores, my habits and values than by my genetic
makeup. Therefore, as a parent, I project my children into the future provided they carrying my
cherished beliefs, my language. This involves me in their education. Social
media, public education, institutions of higher education and even Artificial
Intelligence all compete with me to educate my children. ChatGPT communicates
implicit suppositions and value judgements in ways that elude detection and
complicate my ability to challenge them. The odds against my success in
conveying my ideas of the world when they contravene the basic assumptions that
pervade our thin cultural homogeneity are overwhelming. Such is my challenge
with free speech today. Our supposedly open society is both more intrusive and
monolithic. The barriers parents would erect against bad but attractive ideas
are less successful. Moreso, short term results like popularity and sexual
attention are more immediately available than the slow, long-term
results gained from teaching my children competencies and the virtues which
make for a happy adult family. We don’t gain from,
nor can we effectively control the spread of bad ideas. Especially since my bad
ideas may well be your good ideas. All we can do is allow this high stakes, and
heavily fraught cultural experimentation to play out to what we hope is best
results. It behooves wise parents to be on the right side of these
experimentations so that successful children are projected into the future.
Many institutions and associations which we once relied upon to help raise our
children have adopted the most extreme forms of the liberal approach which has
morphed into the call for autonomy at all costs. The responsibilities of
child-rearing are jettisoned along with the virtues that being a parent
requires. Here free speech is wrongly conceived as the ability to say whatever
I feel without living with the consequences. The advantage of reaching these
extremes is that the implausibility of their success is laid bare and their
eventual failure ensured. The goal is to be far away when the house collapses
or more optimistically to be ready to return when these institutions learn to
right themselves. In the meantime, we build better alternatives, where truth telling,
intelligent speech, trust, shared values, and time-tested ideas prove their
worth by the healthy, productive, attractive, and capable adults that emerge
from them. So long as people are free to parent as they see fit, then the
adherents of true speech, virtuous speech and prudent speech will triumph over
their impostors who will, along with their false and vicious institutions
extinguish themselves without any help from me.