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+---
+title: "A Brief History of Obscenity Law"
+author: "Carlos Ball"
+image: /img/carlos-ball.jpg
+era: "Contemporary"
+topic: "Free Speech"
+draft: false
+---
+
+*The following is an excerpt from chapter one of “[The First Amendment and LGBT Equality](https://www.amazon.com/First-Amendment-LGBT-Equality-Contentious-ebook/dp/B06XVBY2SL/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)“, by Carlos A. Ball.*
+
+**A Brief History of Obscenity**
+
+During approximately the first 120 years of obscenity prosecutions in the United States (that is, roughly between the 1810s until the 1930s), courts frequently, and without much controversy or disagreement, pointed to the promotion of public morality as the main objective behind obscenity laws…
+
+…The first reported obscenity conviction in the United States took place in Philadelphia in 1815. The defendants in Commonwealth v. Sharpless were charged under the common-law crime of public indecency for allowing members of the public, after paying a fee, to enter “a certain house” in order to observe a painting “representing a man in an obscene, impudent and indecent posture with a woman.” In upholding the convictions, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court explained that “what tended to corrupt society, was … a breach of the peace and punishable by indictment. The courts are guardians of the public morals.… Hence, it follows, that an offence may be punishable, if in its nature and by its example, it tends to the corruption of morals.”…
+
+…Congress enacted the [Comstock Act](https://www.britannica.com/event/Comstock-Act) obscenity statute in 1873, making it a federal crime to use the mails to distribute “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” publications. In addition to criminalizing the distribution of obscene materials via the mails, the act authorized the Post Office to refuse to mail obscene materials….
+
+…The same focus on morality continued well into the twentieth century. For example, in 1928, the publisher [Donald Friede was charged under New York’s obscenity statute](https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914777badd7b049343d4c05) for publishing the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. That novel, which had been deemed obscene in England, tells the story of a woman who initially struggles with her sexual attraction to women only to later understand and accept her sexual orientation.
+
+In rejecting the defendant’s motion to have the criminal charge dismissed, the magistrate judge reasoned that “the novel is not only anti-social and offensive to public morals and decency,” but also written in a way that “attract[ed] and focus[ed] attention upon perverted ideas and unnatural vices and [was] strongly calculated to corrupt and debase those members of the community who would be susceptible to its immoral influence.” The magistrate was particularly concerned with the novel’s moral impact on those who might find same-sex sexual conduct appealing. In response to the publisher’s argument that the [Hicklin test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hicklin_test) inappropriately relied on the susceptibilities of society’s “dullest-witted and most fallible members” to determine what was obscene, the judge noted that this particular novel, which was literary and well-written, was problematic precisely because it aimed to corrupt “those of mature age and of high intellectual development and professional attainment.”
+
+In upholding the obscenity prosecution, the magistrate embraced the notion of “thematic obscenity,” that is, the idea that a publication was obscene if it presented intimate relationships outside of heterosexual marriage as morally acceptable, even in the absence of explicit depictions of sexual acts. The judge expressed particular concern about the novel’s portrayal of “unnatural and depraved” (that is, same-sex) relationships as ones that were to be “idealized and extolled.” Rather than criticizing these relationships, the book presented the characters “who indulge in these vices … in attractive terms, and it is maintained throughout that they be accepted on the same plane as persons normally constituted, and that their perverse and inverted love is as worthy as the affection between normal beings and should be considered just as sacred by society.”…
+
+…The promotion of public morality through law was grounded in the notion that it was appropriate for the state to discourage individuals from engaging in conduct that society deemed to be morally wrong. …Although courts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries embraced public morality as the normative basis for obscenity law, around the 1930s a growing number of judges began to express skepticism of the notion that public morality granted the government virtually untrammeled discretion to regulate obscenity…
+
+The national mobilization engendered by World War II helped to create the conditions that allowed for the emergence of the homophile movement, as the early LGBT rights movement called itself. The war brought together millions of men and women in single-sex environments, leading some to realize that they were not alone in experiencing same-sex attraction. After the war, many of these individuals chose not to return to their places of origin, and instead relocated to large urban areas where others with similar sexual and romantic interests lived…
+
+Although …repression caused much suffering, it also encouraged a band of brave LGBT activists to come together to do what they could to protect their communities and themselves from government coercion and harassment. The first homophile organization, the Mattachine Society, was formed in Los Angeles in 1951 by a handful of men, most of whom were former members of the Communist Party.
+
+The early years of the [Mattachine Society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattachine_Society) were characterized by considerable infighting and a penchant for secrecy. This led a group of dissatisfied members, both men and women, to create a new organization with the goal of publishing a magazine that would advocate for gay equality more openly. The purpose of the magazine, as expressed in the articles of incorporation of the nonprofit entity that published it, was to address “homosexuality from the scientific, historical and critical point of view, and to aid in the social integration and rehabilitation of the sexual variant.” The founders called their magazine ONE (letters capitalized) based on the nineteenth-century Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle’s declaration that “a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.”
+
+The first issue of ONE, published in January 1953, included an account by Dale Jennings, a cofounder of both the Mattachine Society and ONE, of his arrest and trial in Los Angeles for allegedly soliciting a male undercover vice-squad police officer to commit a sexual act. Early issues also included poetry, fiction, and news clippings on topics of interest to gay people. In addition, several of ONE’s articles decried the treatment of lesbians and gay men by police authorities and called for an end to the entrapment tactics of vice squads.
+
+At first, newsstand operators refused to carry the magazine, but after sales in gay bars in Los Angeles proved there was a market for the publication, some newsstands agreed to sell it. As for those who subscribed, most paid extra to have the magazine sent to them first class, in sealed envelopes without a return address.
+
+By July 1953, the magazine’s paid circulation had reached two thousand, with a readership that was considerably larger given that copies were frequently circulated among friends. Letters to the editor indicated that the magazine was being read across the country. The fear of being identified as gay or lesbian meant that the letters were often published without accompanying names, sometimes with the only identifying information being “m” for male and “f” for female, in addition to the name of the town and state where the writer lived…
+
+…Although staff members did not know it at the time, three months after the magazine was first published, FBI agents in Los Angeles began reading it in search of obscene or subversive material. In July 1953, the FBI opened a formal investigation of the magazine, which included mailing each issue to FBI headquarters in Washington for further review. A few weeks later, local postal authorities seized copies of ONE’s August issue pending review by officials in Washington to determine whether it was mailable under the federal obscenity statute. That particular issue, with a cover titled “Homosexual Marriage?,” included the first article published in a gay American magazine discussing whether the law should allow same-sex couples to marry. Only after officials in Washington determined that the issue was mailable did the Post Office distribute the copies, three weeks after it had seized them….
+
+…In response to complaints from some readers that the magazine was too tame, the editors also asked Julber to write an essay, published in the October 1954 issue—the same issue that postal officials later seized after deeming it obscene—detailing how the magazine determined what it could publish in order to steer clear of obscenity laws. Julber opined that ONE did not run afoul of obscenity statutes as long as it published materials limited to “the discussion of the social, economic, personal and legal problems of homosexuals, for the purpose of better understanding of and by society.” But the magazine had to stay away from materials that “appealed to the lusts or salacity or sexual appetites … of ONE’s readers.… ONE, in other words can appeal to the heads, but not the sexual desires, of its readers.” Julber then proceeded to list the kinds of contributions that could not be published, including “lonely hearts ads, … ‘cheesecake’ art or photos, … descriptions of experiences [that are] too explicit, … descriptions of homosexuality as a practice which the author encourages in others, or waxes too enthusiastic about [and] fiction with too much physical contact between the characters.” Ironically, postal authorities refused to mail the approximately six hundred copies of the issue—sardonically titled “You can’t print it!”—containing Julber’s explanations of ONE’s obscenity prevention policies…
+
+…Several months after the Post Office seized their issue, ONE’s editors authorized Julber to file a lawsuit in federal court challenging the government’s action. (Julber asked the American Civil Liberties Union for assistance, but the organization turned down the request because the magazine was a gay one.) After the trial court ruled in the government’s favor, Julber appealed. But a federal appellate court rejected his claim that the government had violated the Free Speech Clause in refusing to mail the gay magazine. In doing so, it explained that whether material was obscene under the federal obscenity statute could only be determined “by some discussion of the moral sense of the public.” Recognizing that “morals are not static,” the judges believed it was necessary to define the statutory terms “in the light of today’s moral dictionary.”…
+
+…ONE responded to the Court of Appeals’ decision with an angry and pugnacious editorial explaining that the magazine saw itself as fighting for the free speech rights of all Americans and that, in some ways, the Post Office had done it a favor by raising the issue of its rights under the First Amendment: “Events may prove that in no other way could the rights of homosexual American citizens be adequately and finally tested, and the legal and social problems of the homosexual be thoroughly and publicly aired.” The editorial also complained that lesbians and gay men were permitted few outlets of expression and that whenever someone wrote realistically about “homosexual attachment—the specter of Obscenity stands ready with fangs bared.” The editorial ended with a promise: “ONE intends to fight to … insure for homosexuals the right to speak for themselves, to publish and disseminate literature wherein the homosexual may answer the prejudice and false charges against him with facts and forthright statements. In simple words, ONE rightfully demands the ‘Freedom of the Press.’”…
+
+…The Supreme Court granted the certiorari petition in [One v. Olesen](https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/406/one-inc-v-olesen-9th-cir), but rather than asking for briefs and scheduling oral arguments, it instead summarily reversed the Court of Appeals in a one-sentence, unanimous, and *per curiam* [unsigned] opinion that cited to Roth v United States. It was not surprising that the Supreme Court, in reversing the lower court’s ruling, cited Roth, its most important obscenity decision to date, issued several months after the federal appellate decision in One and several weeks before ONE filed its certiorari petition. Clearly, the Supreme Court did not believe that the October 1954 issue of the gay magazine was obscene under Roth. The question that remains unanswered—and will likely never be definitively answered given its summary reversal in One—is precisely why the Court so believed.
+
+Despite the unavoidable uncertainty that accompanies one-sentence rulings, it is possible, in looking at One and Roth together, to reach reasonable conclusions about the Court’s prevailing views on obscenity as they applied to a gay publication. First, the Court likely concluded, after presumably analyzing the magazine’s content, that it did not sufficiently appeal to prurient interests to qualify as obscene under Roth. The Court, it is reasonable to believe, concluded that the magazine lacked the minimum degree of explicit sexual content required to support a finding that its primary objective was to appeal to the prurient interests of its readers.
+
+At the same time, however, the magazine did have some sexual content. The issue in question, after all, included a story about a romantic relationship between two women; a sardonic poem about the same-sex interests of some British peers and the visit to public bathrooms by men looking for sex with other men; and an advertisement by a Swiss magazine that, in addition to publishing political and sociological articles, contained erotic pictures.81 But, as we have seen, the Court had made clear in Roth that “sex and obscenity are not synonymous.” What distinguished permissible from impermissible depictions and references to sex under Roth was the extent of the material’s social value. The second reasonable conclusion that we can reach when interposing the two cases, therefore, is that the gay magazine’s content, to use Judge Horn’s phrase, manifested, at the very least, “the slightest redeeming social importance.”
+
+It is in many ways astounding that the Supreme Court in 1958 was willing to recognize that a magazine dedicated to the needs and interests of lesbians and gay men had sufficient social importance—despite containing some sexual content—to reverse the lower court’s finding of obscenity. In thinking about what the Court did in One, it is essential to keep in mind the prevailing social consensus that same-sex sexual relationships and conduct were immoral and deviant. As the two leading commentators on obscenity law noted at the time, “it could scarcely be said that One, The Homosexual Magazine enjoys any substantial degree of public acceptance in the nation or that it comports with contemporary standards of the average or majority of the national community.”
+
+The outcome in One strongly suggests the Court believed that, for purposes of determining the scope of free speech protections, the assessment of the social value of publications deemed by the government to be obscene had to be conducted independently of majoritarian judgments about the morality of the sexual relationships and conduct depicted therein. Indeed, One reflects the extent to which the Supreme Court by the late 1950s had embraced the idea that majoritarian moral objections to certain kinds of sexual relationships and acts should be kept separate from the determination of whether particular materials were legally obscene. If the Court in One had accepted the federal appellate court’s reasoning that the morality of the sexual relationships in question, as determined by contemporary social standards, was a crucial factor in assessing whether the materials were legally obscene, it is highly unlikely that it would have protected the gay magazine under the First Amendment.
+
+One constituted another instance in which the government invited the Court to link the state’s authority to regulate obscenity to the preservation of public morals. Its unwillingness to do so foreshadowed its holding the following year in Kingsley Pictures that the government could not constitutionally prevent the distribution of materials on the ground that they promoted immoral relationships.
+
+After One, it became clear that the government could not censor a publication dedicated to exploring the place of sexual minorities in society, even if most Americans deemed same-sex sexual relationships and conduct to be morally unacceptable. What was not so clear was whether the First Amendment provided protection to publications that, for their era, had significant same-sex erotic content…
+
+…[Nevertheless,] ONE’s legal victory allowed for the continuation and expansion of a phenomenon that had never before taken place in American history: lesbians and gay men sharing their views in print about both their sexuality and their place in society. This expression took place not only through the publication of homophile magazines such as ONE, the Mattachine Review (published by the Mattachine Society), and the Ladder (published by the Daughters of Bilitis), but also through other printed forms, such as the growing number of novels being published with gay and lesbian themes. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, there was an explosion in the publication of lesbian pulp novels, many of which contained positive, and increasingly erotic, portrayals of female same-sex sexual relationships. If the Court in One had affirmed the government’s victory in the lower courts, it would have made it possible for prosecutors and other law enforcement officials to prevent the distribution of books and magazines simply on the basis that they contained lesbian and gay themes. The fact that the government after One could no longer justify its regulation of publications aimed at presenting same-sex sexual relationships and conduct in a positive light on the ground that they violated society’s moral strictures provided constitutional protection for publishers, writers, and advocates who questioned those strictures. The judicial victory encouraged the publication of books and magazines that helped to render lesbians and gay men more visible, and to do so on terms set by them rather than by a hostile society.
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+---
+title: "Free Speech Is Supposed to Be Free"
+author: "Mick Hume"
+image: /img/mick-hume.jpg
+era: "Contemporary"
+topic: "Free Speech"
+draft: false
+---
+
+*The Following is an Excerpt from Chapter 1 of [“Trigger Warning”, by Mick Hume](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trigger-Warning-Offensive-Killing-Speech-ebook/dp/B01EQOZA5K/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)*
+
+**Free Speech Is Supposed To Be Free**
+
+It often appears to have slipped our Anglo-American society’s mind that free speech is supposed to be Free. That’s free as in ‘free as a bird’, to soar as high as it can and swoop as low as it chooses. Not as in ‘free-range chicken’, at liberty only to scratch in the dirt within a fenced-in pen and en route to the chopping block.
+
+Free means speech should not be shackled by official censorship imposed by governments, police, courts or any other state-licensed pecknose or prodstaff. Nor should it be stymied by unofficial censorship exercised through university speech codes and ‘safe zones’, twitter-storming mobs of online crusaders against offensiveness, or Islamist zealots gunning for blasphemy. And nor should it be sacrificed by the spineless self-censorship of intellectual invertebrates.
+
+If it is to mean anything, free speech has to live up to its name. This is the hardest thing for many who claim to endorse the principle to remember in practice. It means that what others say or write need not conform to what you, I, or anybody else might prefer. Bad taste or good, offensive or attractive, cutting or boring. Just so long as it is free.
+
+Here is the terrible truth about free speech. Anybody can choose to write, blog, tweet, chant, preach, phone a radio programme or shout at a television set. Not all of them will have the purity of soul of Jesus Christ or Joan Rivers, the wisdom of Socrates or Simon Cowell, or the good manners of Prince Harry or Piers Morgan. That’s tough. They still get the same access to free speech as the rest of us, whether we like it or not.
+
+Defending the unfettered Free in free speech is not a question of endorsing whatever objectionable or idiotic things might be written or said. Nobody had to find Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons insightful or hilarious in order to stand by its right to publish them. Nor is it a question of being soft and suffering somebody else’s nonsense in silence. Free speech means you are also free to talk back as you see fit.
+
+The Free in free speech does mean recognising that free speech is for fools, fanatics and the other fellow too – even if they want to use that freedom to argue against it. Like all true liberties, free speech is an indivisible and universal right. We defend it for all or not at all.
+
+Remembering to put the Free in free speech makes clear why we should oppose attempts to outlaw or curtail certain categories of speech. Freedom is, unfortunately, indivisible. You cannot have half-freedom, part-time freedom or fat-free freedom. You cannot abolish slavery but only for white people or celebrities. Similarly you cannot declare your support for free speech, but only defend those parts of it that you like or that meet your preferred set of standards, however high-minded those preferences might appear. If one leg or even one gangrenous toe remains chained to the post, the entire body is still shackled.
+
+In all the talk about free speech today, how often do you hear free speech spoken of as a universal and non-negotiable right? Instead the focus seems always to be on the buts, the exceptions, the limits to freedom. Everybody in public life might insist that they support free speech, but scratch the surface and it becomes clear that what many support is not so much free speech as speech on parole. They want speech that is released from custody only on license with a promise of good behaviour, preferably wearing a security ankle bracelet to stop it straying from the straight and narrow, having signed the rhetorical offenders’ register. Speech that is free to toe the line, stick to the script and do what it is told. The reinterpretation of freedom to mean liberty-on-license is a con that the free-speech fraudsters should not be allowed to get away with…
+
+…As Thomas Paine, the English radical who became a key figure in both the American and the French revolutions of the eighteenth century, wrote in the introduction to his classic The Age of Reason (a critique of religion considered so offensive that it was subject to serial prosecutions by the British government): ‘He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.’ It is not only those directly denied their freedom who are ‘enslaved’ by selectively chaining some forms of speech.
+
+It is important to remember that free speech in the West… was never a gift from the gods or an act of largesse doled out by governments. From the Magna Carta 800 years ago to today, any liberties that are worth the parchment they are written on have been hard-won in a struggle to wrest them from our rulers. Once won, those liberties do not come with any moral commandments. Nobody has to pass through the eye of an ethical needle to qualify for the right to free speech. There should be no official test to pass or license to obtain before you can express an opinion…
+
+…We should remember that the Free in free speech is not only about the freedom to speak and write as you see fit. It is also about the freedom of the rest of us to hear and read everything that we choose, and to judge for ourselves what is right. The flipside of freedom of speech is the freedom to listen (or not) and to choose.
+
+We are under no obligation to take any notice of anybody’s words; the right to free speech never entails a ‘right’ to be taken seriously. But nor does the speaker have any obligation to restrict what they say to what we want to hear. To mean something worthwhile, freedom must be first and foremost for the other person’s point of view. George Orwell put in perfectly in his 1945 essay ‘The Freedom of the Press’ (originally written as a preface to his novel Animal Farm, though ironically the publisher refused to include it): ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’
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+---
+title: "Hate Speech and Moral Knowledge"
+author: "Jonathan Rauch"
+image: /img/jonathan-rauch.jpg
+era: "Contemporary"
+topic: "Free Speech"
+draft: false
+---
+
+*The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Rauch’s [“Kindly Inquisitors: New Attacks on Free Thought”](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindly-Inquisitors-Attacks-Thought-Expanded-ebook/dp/B00FLO0F78/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Kindly+Inquisitors%3A+New+Attacks+on+Free+Thought&qid=1572685723&s=digital-text&sr=1-1)*
+
+**Minorities, Hate Speech, and Moral Knowledge**
+
+Some ideas actually are false, and at some point the process of checking establishes their falsehood so firmly that to proceed as if they might be true becomes ridiculous. For example, Holocaust denial: isn’t it a stretch to claim we can learn something by debating neo-Nazis about the existence of gas chambers? Fallibilism is all well and good, but come on—enough is enough. In the twenty-first century, do Jews really need to put up with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic fraud?
+
+…One answer, a very important answer, is that liberal science is not unregulated, even if it is not regulated by politicians. Just ask a creationist who has gone looking for a job as an evolutionary biologist. Scientific societies, professional organizations, peer-reviewed journals, and intellectual respectability all do their part to uphold standards and distinguish knowledge from quackery. If a “reparative therapist” is barred by the American Psychiatric Association from the ranks of medical practitioners, I have no problem with that, provided the association is doing its best to reflect the best scientific (not political) consensus….
+
+But that reply is a political answer to an epistemological question, and I think I need to drill deeper. Can we learn anything by, say, letting someone claim that Jesus cures homosexuality in sixty days? Is there any social benefit to be had from allowing the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? And we must not overlook the specific effects on minorities: it doesn’t seem fair to sacrifice their interests on the altar of free speech. Do gays, and Jews benefit from toleration of homophobic or anti-Semitic claptrap? I believe the answers are *yes, yes, and yes*. Society benefits from the toleration of hate speech, and so do targeted minorities. To explain why, I need to say a few words about a form of knowledge which the original book did not much explore: moral knowledge…
+
+Charles Sanders Peirce… pioneered the insight that the development of knowledge is inherently a social process. “Individualism and falsity are one and the same,” he wrote. Without public checking, there is no way to know, even in principle, whether the man scribbling alone in his room is Einstein or a lunatic. “Unless truth be recognized as public—as that of which any person would come to be convinced if he carried his inquiry, his sincere search for immovable belief, far enough—then there will be nothing to prevent each one of us from adopting an utterly futile belief of his own which all the rest will disbelieve.” Science is unique not because it tests propositions experimentally but because it tests them socially, through a decentralized public process that refracts and distills the experience of countless observers, reaching conclusions which embody the view of no one in particular. The magic is not in the experiment but in the repeating of it and the criticism of it. “One man’s experience is nothing if it stands alone,” said Peirce. “If he sees what others cannot, we call it hallucination. It is not “my” but “our” experience that has to be thought of; and this “us” has indefinite possibilities.”8 Knowledge, then, is often empirical, but it is always social. By its very nature, it transcends individual effort. “We are all putting our shoulders to the wheel for an end that none of us can catch more than a glimpse at—that which the generations are working out,” wrote Peirce. “But we can see that the development of embodied ideas is what it will consist in.”…
+
+Knowledge is abstract: propositions, ideas, concepts. Nonetheless, it is real. Popper placed knowledge in an interesting realm which he called World Three. World One is the material, external world of physical objects and states. World Two is the subjective, inner world of consciousness and mental states. World Three is the realm of ideas and abstractions, what Popper called “the world of objective contents of thoughts”: the world of ideas and propositions, of “scientific and poetic thoughts and works of art.” World Three is the world of things we know. It is intangible but not insubstantial; indeed, it exists independently of whether any particular person subjectively “knows” it. Even if all humans disappeared tomorrow, our knowledge would continue to exist in books and other representations, and it could be decoded and reconstructed and put to immediate use by a successor race. World Three “is a natural product of the human animal, comparable to a spider’s web,” writes Popper. But it is far more complex and dynamic than a spider’s web, so complex and dynamic that it develops emergent properties and takes on autonomous characteristics of its own: properties and characteristics which, in turn, interact with and act upon human individuals and societies. It is, in that way, truly a “world,” a part of our daily environment.
+
+Of course, World Three includes the hard-science stuff, the laws of thermodynamics and the like. But that is only a fraction of the total. A theme of this book is that the purview of the public checking process, of the “science game,” is in no way limited to the experimental sciences. “Checking” can mean performing crisply definitive experiments. But even in the hardest of the sciences, the means of testing include not just lab experimentation but thought experimentation, logical analysis, consistency with established facts, consistency with personal experience, facial plausibility, proponents’ and opponents’ credibility, ideas’ aesthetic appeal (many physicists have regarded beauty as a sign of truth), and the residual X factor we call persuasiveness. All of that and more qualifies as checking, as long as no one has final say and no one gets special authority. No, I am not claiming that all methods of checking are created equal and anything goes. I would rather have my drugs tested in a double-blind controlled trial than in an online debate. I am saying that I would rather have the online debate than nothing at all. It, too, can find error and build knowledge… In real life, crisp empirical verification is only a small part of what people in a science game do, and in many disciplines—ethics, literary criticism, interpretive history, philosophy, much of journalism, much of economics, and so on—crisp empirical verification hardly ever happens at all.
+
+If that is the case, then from the standpoint of social epistemology and the public quest for knowledge, ethical propositions are like any other kind. Their logical structure or empirical content may be different from Newton’s laws of motion, but so what? Though we can’t smash them in cyclotrons or inject them into rats, we can do what really matters, which is expose them to critical public debate and keep the ones which hold up best. They may be more like squishy history than crunchy chemistry, but they are subject to the corrective effects of rational scrutiny and accumulating facts.
+
+We learn empirically that women are as intelligent and capable as men; this knowledge strengthens the moral claims of gender equality. We learn from social experience that laws permitting religious pluralism make societies more governable; this knowledge strengthens the moral claims of religious liberty. We learn from critical argumentation that the notion that some races are fit to be enslaved by others is impossible to defend without recourse to hypocrisy and mendacity; this knowledge strengthens the moral claims of inherent human dignity. Over decades and centuries, ethical concepts about gender equality and religious liberty and individual dignity emerge, evolve, and stand the test of time. They are not empirical knowledge, to be sure, but they are subject to social checking; as a result, they are knowledge, and they exhibit progress.
+
+Moral knowledge, like other knowledge, is not definitive; but it is directional. Nothing is guaranteed among ornery humans, but, generally and over longer spans, you can look at a tape of a liberal society’s moral development and know which way it is running: usually toward less social violence, more social participation, and a wider circle of dignity and toleration. And if you see a society which is stuck and not making this kind of moral progress, you can guess that it is not very liberal and that authorities or taboos or other causes of what Peirce called “fixation of belief” have stunted or suppressed public criticism.
+
+Kant spoke of two great wonders that filled him with awe, “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” With due respect, he was not quite right about “within me.” Dogs and infants have some kind of internal moral sense. What they do not have is the social capability to bring reason to bear on moral questions and so to develop a World Three of moral knowledge. Perhaps an individual chimpanzee may engage in something like moral development over the course of a lifetime. But humanity is unique in its ability to develop morally as a species, over the arc of many lifetimes. The greater miracle, then, is not the moral law within us but the moral knowledge without. As brilliantly as liberal science has done in advancing the experimental sciences, I often suspect that its moral advances are even more impressive, because it has had so much less guidance from nature along the way. And criticism, ***public criticism,\*** is the key…
+
+Today’s… argument for hate-speech laws asks us to imagine a really hard case: not a society where people say offensive things in random directions now and then (which should be allowed), but one where (in Jeremy Waldron’s words) vulnerable groups “have to live and go about in a society festooned with vicious characterizations of them and their kind and with foul denigrations of their status. . . . [T]he upshot might be that they would avoid much public life or participate in it without the security that the rest of us enjoy; either that, or they would have to summon up (from their own resources) extraordinary reserves of assurance as they went about their business, a burden that is not required of the rest of us.”13 Surely, in so extreme a case, promising to punish violence or discrimination after the fact is not enough; surely, in this case, laws preemptively suppressing bigotry are appropriate?…
+
+…The case for hate-speech prohibitions mistakes the cart for the horse, imagining that anti-hate laws are a cause of toleration when they are almost always a consequence. In democracies, minorities do not get fair, enforceable legal protections until after majorities have come around to supporting them. By the time a community is ready to punish intolerance legally, it will already be punishing intolerance culturally. At that point, turning haters into courtroom martyrs is unnecessary and often counterproductive. In any case, we can be quite certain that hate-speech laws did not change America’s attitude toward its gay and lesbian minority, because there were no hate-speech laws. Today, firm majorities accept the morality of homosexuality, know and esteem gay people, and endorse gay unions and families….
+
+…In 1957, the U.S. Army Map Service fired an astronomer named Franklin Kameny after learning he was gay. Kameny, unlike so many others, did not go quietly. He demanded reinstatement from the U.S. Civil Service Commission and the Congress. When he got nowhere, he filed a Supreme Court brief… [but]… lost every appeal to get his job back; the Supreme Court refused to hear his case. In 1963, he launched a campaign to repeal the District of Columbia’s sodomy law and lost (it would take three decades). He ran for Congress in 1971 and lost. But at every stage he fired moral imaginations. He and others saw Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant not as threats to hide from but as opportunities to be seized: opportunities to rally gays, educate straights, and draw sharp moral comparisons. “Is that what you think this country is all about? Really?” To appeal to a country’s conscience, you need an antagonist. ***Suppression of anti-gay speech and thought, had it been conceivable at the time, would have slowed the country’s moral development,** **not speeded it.*** It would have given the illusion that the job was done when, in fact, it was only beginning. It would have condescended to a people fighting for respect…
+
+Most of us, however, are not Galileos or Einsteins, or Sakharovs or Kings. Most of us don’t need to be. We need only a few Kamenys, plus a system that is very good at testing and rejecting bad hypotheses and at bringing forward better ones…
+
+…What took place was not just empirical learning but also moral learning. How can it be wicked to love? How can it be noble to lie? How can it be compassionate to reject your own children? How can it be kind to harass and taunt? How can it be fair to harp on one Biblical injunction when so many others are ignored? How can it be just to penalize what does no demonstrable harm? Gay people were asking straight people to test their values against logic, against compassion, against life. Gradually, then rapidly, criticism had its effect.
+
+Moral learning lags behind empirical learning and takes an even less linear path. Many religions, for example, are only now starting to grapple with their deplorable record on homosexuality. But I think the direction they are headed is pretty clear. And the speed of change in the past two decades, since this book was first published, has flabbergasted me. When I began my own advocacy of gay marriage in 1996, I thought I might see some success in two or three generations, if ever. I should have had more confidence in liberal science. You cannot be gay in America today and doubt that moral learning is real and that the open society fosters it. And so, twenty years on, I feel more confident than ever in answering the humanitarian and egalitarian challenges, even in their newly refined versions. The answer to bias and prejudice is pluralism, not purism. The answer, that is, is not to try to legislate bias and prejudice out of existence or to drive them underground, but to pit biases and prejudices against each other and make them fight in the open. That is how, in the crucible of rational criticism, moral error is burned away. That is how, in my lifetime, moral error was burned away.
+
+I believe the hope of living in a world free of discrimination and prejudice is a utopian pipe dream, and is as anti-human and dangerous as most utopian pipe dreams. The quest to stamp out discrimination or bigotry or racism wherever it appears is a quest to force all opinion into a single template. I reject the premise, not just the methods, of the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which calls on signatory countries to prohibit “all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred.” In my view, if minorities know what is good for us, we should at every turn support pluralism, with all its social messiness and personal hurt. Moral progress is much more valuable to us than legal protection. Politicians and activists, however well intentioned, who would shelter us from criticism and debate offer false comfort.
+
+History shows that, over time and probably today more than ever, the more open the intellectual environment, the better minorities will do. It is just about that simple.
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+---
+title: "Hate Speech Is Free Speech"
+author: "Nadine Strossen"
+image: /img/nadine-strossen.jpg
+era: "Contemporary"
+topic: "Free Speech"
+draft: false
+---
+
+*The following is an excerpt from [“Hate: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech Not Censorship”](https://www.amazon.co.uk/HATE-Should-Resist-Censorship-Inalienable-ebook/dp/B07BH3LYZ1/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=), By Nadine Strossen*
+
+**Hate Speech Is Free Speech**
+
+Debates about [free speech] issues are often marred by widespread confusion about the governing free speech principles. Too many people, including even some lawyers, wrongly assert that under our Constitution “hate speech” is either absolutely protected or completely unprotected. Neither statement is accurate.
+
+On the one hand, many who argue that we should revise our law to empower government to punish “hate speech” wrongly assume that such speech is now absolutely protected. In support of their proposals, they cite many examples of speech that already is subject to sanction in the United States, consistent with longstanding free speech principles. For example, they regularly point to speech that constitutes a genuine threat or targeted harassment, and thus directly causes specific imminent serious harm, making it already punishable consistent with the emergency principle.
+
+On the other hand, too many people wrongly assert that “hate speech is not free speech,” assuming that speech with a hateful message is automatically excluded from First Amendment protection. Consistent with the cardinal viewpoint neutrality principle, however, government may not punish “hate speech” (or speech conveying any particular point of view) merely because some of us—even the vast majority of us—consider its views or ideas objectionable or even abhorrent. For that reason, no matter what adjective we might use to excoriate speech whose ideas we disfavor—including “hateful,” “abusive,” “unwelcome,” “offensive,” “dangerous,” or “violent” (to cite some epithets that are invoked by advocates of suppressing the designated speech)—such disfavor alone does not warrant censoring the speech.
+
+Moreover, speech may not be censored because its message might have a disturbing impact on the hearts or minds of some audience members. Viewpoint-based restrictions pose the greatest danger to the core value underlying the First Amendment: our right as individuals to make our own choices about what ideas we choose to express, receive, and believe. Because they distort public debate, viewpoint-based regulations are also antithetical to our democratic political system. Additionally, they violate equality principles because, reflecting majoritarian political pressures, they generally target unpopular, minority, and dissenting views and speakers. Censorship of “hate speech” is also unjustified by the speech’s feared harmful tendency: the generalized fear that it might indirectly contribute to future negative conduct by some people who hear or read it.
+
+These speech-protective precepts are not based on a presumption that speech cannot cause harm. To the contrary, we cherish speech precisely because of its unique capacity to influence us, both positively and negatively. But even though speech can contribute to potential harms, it would be more harmful to both individuals and society to empower the government to suppress speech for that reason, except consistent with the emergency and viewpoint neutrality principles. This book substantiates that conclusion with many examples from many different countries.
+
+The Supreme Court strongly reaffirmed the foregoing First Amendment principles in a 2011 case in which it upheld the right of individuals to engage in extremely hurtful and offensive speech: picketing outside the funerals of military veterans with signs conveying hateful views about military personnel, Catholics, the pope, and gay men and lesbians. As the Court explained:
+
+> Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. W‌e cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.
+
+The Court’s near-unanimity in this case is noteworthy, and typical of its free speech rulings. In recent decades, the Court has been closely divided ideologically, often splitting 5–4 on other constitutional controversies. But justices across the ideological spectrum have consistently been united by strong support for the core freedom of speech principles, even when the speech conveys hateful and hated views.
+
+This robust understanding of our First Amendment should likewise transcend partisan divides in our political sphere, because the underlying principles protect all speakers—and all audience members—whatever our views, and whoever we are. That critical point was stressed in the midst of the civil rights movement by a 1961 New York court ruling that upheld the free speech rights of an American Nazi to convey racist ideas, consistent with the viewpoint neutrality and emergency principles. The judge explained that these principles also redounded to the benefit of the civil rights activists who were conveying precisely the opposite, antiracist ideas, and who consistently were threatened with censorship in communities where their ideas were despised and feared, including the many campuses that excluded them:
+
+> [T‌he] unpopularity of views,… their obnoxiousness… is not enough [to justify suppressing them.] Otherwise, the… anti-racist… could be suppressed, if he undertakes to speak in “restricted” areas; and one who asks that public schools be open indiscriminately to all ethnic groups could be lawfully suppressed, if only he choose to speak where persuasion is needed most.
+
+The fact that “hate speech” laws inevitably endanger views across the political spectrum is confirmed by recent experience under such laws in European countries. In a September 2017 essay, entitled “In Europe, Hate Speech Laws Are Often Used to Suppress and Punish Left-Wing Viewpoints,” journalist Glenn Greenwald writes:
+
+> Many Americans who long for Europe’s hate speech restrictions assume that those laws are used to outlaw and punish expression of the bigoted ideas they most hate: racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny. Often, such laws are used that way…. But hate speech restrictions… in those countries… have frequently been used to constrain and sanction a wide range of political views that many left-wing censorship advocates would never dream could be deemed “hateful,” and even against opinions which many of them likely share.
+
+If we allowed government to suppress speech that might exert a negative influence on our minds or actions, then no speech would be safe. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared in a landmark 1919 dissent, in which he strongly repudiated the majority’s bad tendency doctrine, “Every idea is an incitement.” He did not mean by this statement that government may therefore suppress every idea, but rather the opposite: that government may suppress speech only when it directly causes specific, imminent, and serious harm.
+
+As history teaches, permitting the government to punish speech based on any lesser connection between the speech and the feared harm would be a license for witch hunts—literally, as well as figuratively. Justice Louis Brandeis reminded us of this danger in his 1927 opinion in Whitney v. California, which Justice Holmes joined. After rejecting the majority’s bad tendency standard, and its conclusion that the government could constitutionally punish Socialist Party activist Anita Whitney because her socialist advocacy might lead to “terrorism and violence,” Brandeis wrote: “Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech. . . . Men feared witches and burnt women.” Accordingly, he articulated the highly speech-protective emergency standard that the Court finally unanimously endorsed in 1969: “Only an emergency can justify repression.” Brandeis added that if the message’s potential danger does not rise to the level of an emergency, the proper response is “more speech, not enforced silence.”
+
+The “hate speech” laws that many other countries now enforce, which license government to punish speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or feared, too often are enforced to suppress today’s counterparts of Anita Whitney: those who express unpopular, dissenting views. It would hardly constitute progress for the United States to revert to a legal regime that enables officials to silence their critics.
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+---
+title: "Miscellaneous Free Speech Arguments"
+author: "Various"
+image: /img/old-books.jpg
+era: "Contemporary"
+topic: "Free Speech"
+draft: false
+---
+
+* {{< newtab title="In Defense of Wholly Free Speech" url="https://therevolutionaryact.com/defense-free-speech/" >}}
+
+* {{< newtab title="The Two Clashing Meanings of ‘Free Speech’" url="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/two-concepts-of-freedom-of-speech/546791/" >}}
+
+* {{< newtab title="The ACLU Position Paper on Freedom of Speech" url="https://www.aclu.org/other/freedom-expression-aclu-position-paper" >}}
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+---
+title: "Postmodern Censoriousness"
+author: "Stephen Hicks"
+image: /img/stephen-hicks.jpg
+era: "Contemporary"
+topic: "Free Speech"
+draft: false
+---
+
+*The following is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks’ [“Free Speech and Postmodernism”](http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/hicks-freespeechpostmodernism.pdf)*
+
+**The Censoriousness of Postmodernism**
+
+The Social Construction of Minds
+
+Traditionally, speech has been seen as an individual cognitive act. The postmodern view, by contrast, is that speech is formed socially in the individual. And since what we think is a function of what we learn linguistically, our thinking processes are constructed socially, depending on the linguistic habits of the groups we belong to. From this epistemological perspective, the notion that individuals can teach themselves or go their own way is a myth. Also, the notion that we can take someone who has been constructed as a racist and simply teach him to unlearn his bad habits, or teach a whole group to unlearn its bad habits, by appealing to their reason—that also is a myth…
+
+…We are constructed socially, the postmoderns argue, and we are, even as adults, not aware of the social construction that underlies the speech we are engaging in. We might feel as though we are speaking freely and making our own choices, but the unseen hand of social construction is making us what we are. What you think and what you do and even how you think are governed by your background beliefs.
+
+[Stanley] Fish states the point abstractly. Catharine MacKinnon applies this point to the special case of women and men, in making her case for censoring pornography. Her argument is not the standard, conservative argument that pornography desensitizes men and gets them riled up to the point where they go out and do brutal things to women. MacKinnon believes that pornography does that, but her argument is deeper. She argues that pornography is a major part of the social discourse that is constructing all of us. It makes men what they are in the first place and it makes women what they are in the first place. So we are culturally constructed by porn as a form of language to adopt certain sex roles and so forth.
+
+As a result of this, the postmoderns infer there is no distinction between speech and action, a distinction that liberals have traditionally prized. According to postmodernists, speech is itself something that is powerful because it constructs who we are and underlies all of the actions that we engage in. And as a form of action, it can and does cause harm to other people. Liberals, say postmodernists, should accept that any form of harmful action must be constrained. Therefore, they must accept censorship.
+
+Another consequence of this view is that group conflict is inevitable, for different groups are constructed differently according to their different linguistic and social backgrounds. Blacks and whites, men and women, are constructed differently and those different linguistic-social-ideological universes will clash with each other. Thus, the speech of the members of each group is seen as a vehicle through which the groups’ competing interests clash. And there will be no way of resolving the clash, because from this perspective you cannot say, “Let’s settle this reasonably.” What reason is, is itself constructed by the prior conditions that made you what you are. What seems reasonable to you is not going to be what is reasonable to the other group. Consequently, the whole discussion is necessarily going to descend into a shouting match.
+
+Let’s summarize this argument and put all of its elements together.
+
+- Speech is a form of social power. [Social Constructivism]
+- Fairness means an equal ability to speak. [Egalitarianism]
+- The ability to speak is unequal across racial and sexual groups. [Collectivism]
+- The races and sexes are in conflict with each other. [Racism and Sexism]
+- The stronger racial and sexual groups, that is, whites and males, will use speech-power to their advantage, at the expense of other races and women. [Zero-Sum Conflict]
+
+What we have, then, are two positions about the nature of speech. The postmoderns say: Speech is a weapon in the conflict between groups that are unequal. And that is diametrically opposed to the liberal view of speech, which says: Speech is a tool of cognition and communication for individuals who are free.
+
+If we adopt the first statement, then the solution is going to be some form of enforced altruism, under which we redistribute speech in order to protect the harmed, weaker groups. If the stronger white males have speech tools they can use to the detriment of the other groups, then do not let them use those speech tools. Generate a list of denigrating words that harm members of the other groups and prohibit members of the powerful groups from using them. Do not let them use the words that reinforce their own racism and sexism, and don’t let them use words that make members of other groups feel threatened. Eliminating those speech advantages will reconstruct our social reality—which is the same goal as affirmative action.
+
+A striking consequence of this analysis is that the toleration of “anything goes” in speech *becomes censorship*. The postmodern argument implies that if anything goes, then that gives permission to the dominant groups to keep on saying the things that keep the subordinate groups in their places. Liberalism thus means helping the silencing of the subordinate groups and letting only the dominant groups have effective speech. Postmodern speech codes, therefore, are not censorship but a form of liberation—they liberate the subordinated groups from the punishing and silencing effects of the powerful groups’ speech, and they provide an atmosphere in which the previously subordinated groups can express themselves. Speech codes equalize the playing field.
+
+As Stanley Fish says:
+
+> Individualism, fairness, merit—these three words are continually in the mouths of our up-to-date, newly respectable bigots who have learned that they need not put on a white hood or bar access to the ballot box in order to secure their ends.
+
+In other words, free speech is what the Ku Klux Klan favors.
+
+The liberal notions of leaving individuals free and telling them that we are going to treat them according to the same rules and judge them on their merit—according to the postmodern Left, that only means reinforcing the status quo, which means keeping the whites and males on top and the rest below. So in order to equalize the power imbalance, explicit and forthright double-standards are absolutely and unapologetically called for by the postmodern Left.
+
+The Justification of Freedom of Speech
+
+…Three broad points must be made. The first is an ethical point: individual autonomy. We live in reality, and it is absolutely important to our survival that we come to understand that reality. But coming to know how the world works and acting on the basis of that knowledge is an individual responsibility. Exercising that responsibility requires social freedoms, and one of the social freedoms that we need is speech. We have the capacity to think or not. But that capacity can be hampered severely by a social atmosphere of fear. That is an indispensable part of the liberal argument. Censorship is a tool of government: the government has the power of force to achieve its end, and depending on how that force is used it can generate an atmosphere of fear that interferes with an individual’s ability to perform the basic cognitive functions he needs to act responsibly in the world.
+
+Second is a social point: We get all sorts of values from each other. I will use David Kelley’s social-value categorization scheme here: in social relationships we exchange knowledge values, friendship and love values, and economic trade values. Often, the pursuit of knowledge values is conducted in specialized institutions, and within those institutions the discovery of truth requires certain protections. If we are going to learn from each other and if we are going to be able to teach others, then we need to be able to engage in certain kinds of social processes: debate, criticism, lecturing, asking stupid questions, and so on. All of that presupposes a key social principle: that we will tolerate those things in our social interactions. Part of the price that we will pay is that our opinions and feelings will be bruised on a regular basis, but—live with it.
+
+Finally, there is a series of political points. As we saw above, beliefs and thoughts are each individual’s responsibility, just as making a living and putting together a happy life are each individual’s responsibility. The purpose of government is to protect individuals’ rights to pursue these activities. The point for free speech is this: Thoughts and speech do not, no matter how false and offensive they are, violate anyone’s rights. Therefore, there is no basis for government intervention.
+
+There is also a point to be made about democracy, which is a feature of our social system. Democracy means decentralizing decision-making about who is going to wield political power for the next period of time. In order to make that decision, we expect voters to make an informed choice, and the only way that they can make an informed choice is if there is much discussion and much vigorous debate. So, free speech is an essential part of maintaining democracy.
+
+Finally, free speech is a check on the abuses of government power. History teaches us to worry about the abuse of government power, and one indispensable way of checking such abuse is to allow people to criticize the government and to prohibit the government from preventing such criticism.
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+---
+title: "Speech Is Not Violence"
+author: "Haidt & Lukianoff"
+image: /img/haidt-lukianoff.jpg
+era: "Contemporary"
+topic: "Free Speech"
+draft: false
+---
+
+*The following is an excerpt from [“The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up A Generation for Failure”](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Coddling-American-Mind-Intentions-Generation-ebook/dp/B07B3LLRSH/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542658702&sr=8-1&keywords=the+coddling+of+the+american+mind), by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff*
+
+**Why Telling Kids That Speech Is Violence Is A Bad Idea**
+
+Most students oppose the use of violence. When asked in a poll conducted by FIRE whether they themselves would use violence to stop someone from speaking, only 1% said yes. But there is a much larger group—roughly 20% to 30%, according to the two surveys we described earlier—that is willing to support other students who use violence, drawing on the sorts of justifications offered by the Berkeley students. The most common justification is that hate speech is violence, and some students believe it is therefore legitimate to use violence to shut down hate speech. Setting aside the questions of moral and constitutional legitimacy, what are the psychological consequences of thinking this way?
+
+Members of some identity groups surely face more frequent insults to their dignity than do straight white males, on average. A free-for-all attitude toward speech that allows people to say whatever they want with no fear of consequences can therefore affect people with different social identities differently. As we noted in chapter 2, some portion of what is commonly called political correctness is just being thoughtful or polite—using words in a way that is considerate to others.86 But students make a serious mistake when they interpret words—even words spoken with hatred—as violence.
+
+In a widely circulated essay in The New York Times in July 2017, the argument that words can be violence was made by Lisa Feldman Barrett, a well-respected professor of psychology and emotion researcher at Northeastern University.87 Barrett offered this syllogism: “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.”
+
+We responded in an essay in The Atlantic, in which we noted that it is a logical error to accept the claim that harm—even physical harm—is the same as violence.88 Barrett’s syllogism takes the form that if A can cause B and B can cause C, then A can cause C. Therefore, if words can cause stress and stress can cause harm, then words can cause harm, but that does not establish that words are violence. It only establishes that words can result in harm—even physical harm—which we don’t doubt. To see the difference, just rerun the syllogism by swapping in “breaking up with your girlfriend” or “giving students a lot of homework.” Both of these can provoke stress in someone else (including elevated levels of cortisol), and stress can cause harm, so both can cause harm. That doesn’t mean that they are violent acts.
+
+Interpreting a campus lecture as violence is a choice, and it is a choice that increases your pain with respect to the lecture while reducing your options for how to respond. If you interpret a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos as a violent attack on your fellow students, then you have a moral obligation to do something about it, perhaps even something violent. That is precisely how trolls manipulate their victims.
+
+But if you keep the distinction between speech and violence clear in your mind, then many more options are available to you. First, you can take the Stoic response and develop your ability to remain unmoved. As Marcus Aurelius advised, “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.” The more ways your identity can be threatened by casual daily interactions, the more valuable it will be to cultivate the Stoic (and Buddhist, and CBT) ability to not be emotionally reactive, to not let others control your mind and your cortisol levels. The Stoics understood that words don’t cause stress directly; they can only provoke stress and suffering in a person who has interpreted those words as posing a threat. You can choose whether to interpret a visiting speaker as harmful. You can pick your battles, devote your efforts to changing policies that matter to you, and make yourself immune to trolls. The internet will always be there; extremists will always be posting potentially offensive images and statements; some groups will be targeted more than others. It’s not fair, but even as we work to lessen hatred and heal divisions, all of us must learn to ignore some of the things we see and just carry on with our day.
+
+A second and more radical response opens up when you reject the “speech is violence” view: you can use your opponents’ ideas and arguments to make yourself stronger. The progressive activist Van Jones (who was President Barack Obama’s green jobs advisor) endorsed this view in February of 2017 in a conversation at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Politics. When Democratic strategist David Axelrod asked Jones about how progressive students should react when people they find ideologically offensive (such as someone associated with the Trump administration) are invited to speak on campus, Jones began by noting the distinction… between physical and emotional “safety”:
+
+> There are two ideas about safe spaces: One is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea. The idea of being physically safe on a campus—not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse, or being targeted specifically, personally, for some kind of hate speech—“you are an n-word,” or whatever—I am perfectly fine with that. But there’s another view that is now I think ascendant, which I think is just a horrible view, which is that “I need to be safe ideologically. I need to be safe emotionally. I just need to feel good all the time, and if someone says something that I don’t like, that’s a problem for everybody else, including the university administration.”
+
+Jones then delivered some of the best advice for college students we have ever heard. He rejected the Untruth of Fragility and turned safetyism on its head:
+
+> I don’t want you to be safe ideologically. I don’t want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That’s different. I’m not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots, and learn how to deal with adversity. I’m not going to take all the weights out of the gym; that’s the whole point of the gym. This is the gym.
+
+Jones understands antifragility. Jones wants progressive college students to see themselves not as fragile candles but as fires, welcoming the wind by seeking out ideologically different speakers and ideas.
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+---
+title: "Two Concepts of Free Speech"
+author: "Philip Pettit"
+image: /img/philip-pettit.jpg
+era: "Contemporary"
+topic: "Free Speech"
+draft: false
+---
+
+*This post is an excerpt from: [Pettit, P 2018, ‘Two Concepts of Free Speech’, in Jennifer Lackey (ed.), \*Academic Freedom\*, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 61-81pp.](https://researchers.anu.edu.au/publications/140017)*
+
+…all agree... that free speech exists only to the extent that there is considerable latitude in speakers’ choices about what to say. And they debate in detail about the precise extent of the required latitude. But they say little or nothing on what it is about choices in that range of speech that makes them free.
+
+…there are two distinct grounds on which speech in the relevant range might be taken to be free. The first is that people are *unhindered* in how they exercise their speech options within that range. The second is that they are *protected* in the exercise of those options: in particular, that they are protected by public law or by the public rules of a corporate body like a university, which has its own domain and government…
+
+*Unhindered Speech*
+
+Unhindered speech, as the phrase suggests, is speech that you can conduct without facing hindrance from other individuals or from any officials, whether they be officials of the state or officials in a corporate body that has its own internal government and regulations. Speech can be hindered in any of a number of ways. Covertly or overtly, others may remove your option of saying what you want to say. Covertly or overtly, they may impose a penalty on your saying it: that is, replace the option by a penalized alternative. Or finally—and necessarily, of course in a covert way—they may deceive you about the chance or need to say it, thereby misrepresenting the option. In short, the hindrance of others in the domain of speech, as in any other domain, may involve removing, replacing, or misrepresenting the options before you.
+
+Even with these clarifications in place, however, there are two different ways in which the requirements of unhindered speech may be understood. You may be taken to enjoy free speech in this sense just so long as you are allowed to say what you actually want to say on a given occasion. Thomas Hobbes (1994, ch. 21.2) would presumably take this to be enough for unhindered speech, as he says that someone is free—and presumably, therefore, free in speech—when “he is not hindered to do what he has a will to”: that is, not hindered to do what he actually wishes to do.
+
+This reading of what it is to enjoy unhindered speech would equate it with enjoying preference-satisfaction in the realm of speech. It puts a premium on being able to speak as you actually wish to speak, without requiring that you would also have been able to act according to your wishes, had you wanted to say something else or wanted indeed to stay silent. Think of the different expressive options you face in such a situation as doors between which you have to choose. On Hobbes’s view, you enjoy freedom of speech insofar as the door you push on—the option you actually prefer—is open to you. It does not require that any of the other doors are open, just the one you choose.
+
+Isaiah Berlin offers an alternative vision of what unhindered speech requires, defending precisely the sort of open-doors picture that Hobbes rejects. According to this account you enjoy free speech on a given occasion just to the extent that all the relevant options or doors, and not just the one you prefer, are open to you. You may choose to speak out in a particular way and find, happily, that that door is open; no one tries to stop you. But it also has to be the case, on this account of unhindered speech, that if you had chosen to say something else instead, or chosen not to speak at all, then that door would also have been open. “The extent of a man’s negative freedom is, as it were, a function of what doors, and how many are open to him; upon what prospects they are open; and how open they are” (Berlin 1969, p. xlviii).
+
+Berlin’s conception of unhindered action or speech is clearly superior to that of Hobbes. For as he points out, you could give yourself Hobbesian freedom of speech, even when you are blocked from saying what you want to say, by getting yourself to change what you want to say: by adapting your preferences. And that does seem downright absurd; it falls far short of our intuitive sense of what the ideal of freedom should ensure. He underlines this normative absurdity quite nicely when he notes: “to teach a man that, if he cannot get what he wants, he must learn to want only what he can get may contribute to his happiness or his security; but it will not increase his civil or political freedom” (Berlin 1969, p. xxxix).
+
+The Hobbesian conception of free speech requires the absence of frustration: you get to say what you actually prefer to say in the context of certain options. The Berlinian requires the absence of interference, as we might put it: you get to say whatever you might want to say, regardless of the option you prefer. Freedom in the sense of non-interference is a more demanding ideal of free speech than freedom in the sense of non-frustration, and from now on we can identify it with the ideal of unhindered speech. But, even interpreted in this way, the ideal of unhindered speech is itself less demanding than the ideal of protected speech.
+
+*Protected Speech*
+
+Taking unhindered speech in Berlin’s sense, then, what distinguishes it from protected speech? Not much stands between them on a common but inadequate account of protection. On that account, the point of protection is to make it more likely that you will enjoy unhindered speech: to increase the expectation or probability of unhindered speech. The difference between unhindered and protected speech on this approach would simply be the difference between actual unhindered-speech and expected unhindered-speech. The same ideal would be at issue in each case but would be presented from different perspectives: in the first case, it would be cast *ex post* as a goal attained, in the second it would be cast *ex ante* as a goal to pursue.
+
+But the point of protection is not just to probabilify in this way. After all, I might make your enjoyment of free speech more probable by bribing others to let you have your say and that would scarcely be a way of protecting you. What protective measures aim to achieve is not primarily to make your enjoyment of unhindered speech as likely as possible—after all, the bribery arrangement might actually do better on that front—but to put burdens in the way of others interfering with you: to render their interference not so much less likely as less accessible (Pettit 2008).
+
+What form should those protective burdens take? Typically, they involve preventive obstacles that remove the option of interference altogether or, more plausibly, penalties that put difficulties or costs, actual or threatened, in the way of interference. In other words, they put in place measures of interference that counter the interference they are designed to block. Paying would-be interferers for not interfering would not interfere with them in this sense. It would put an extra alternative on their menu of options, allowing them not just the option of refraining from interference but the enhanced option of refraining and claiming the payment as reward. That would certainly make non-interference more attractive for them but it would leave the interference option intact; it would put nothing in the way of their taking it instead.
+
+Protected speech appears as a distinct ideal from unhindered speech as soon as we recognize that the point of protection is not to make interference less attractive and less probable but to interfere with the very possibility of interference: to remove that option altogether or to replace it by a penalized alternative. Protecting you means erecting obstacles to the interference of other people in any scenarios, however improbable, where they might choose to try to interfere. And that is quite distinct from trying to make their interference less probable. Doing that would not necessarily mean arranging things so that would-be interferers are obstructed—that may not be the best means of reducing the probability of interference—but arranging things so that others are less likely to interfere. It would mean giving them something more attractive to do, such as refraining from interference and then claiming payment as a reward.
+
+The protection of freedom of speech is always going to raise an issue, of course, as to who is in charge of the protective apparatus. I shall assume here that when protection is necessary—when there is no natural obstacle or hurdle stopping some from interfering with others—it is provided by law, with the support of social norms, and that that law is subject to democratic, constitutional control, not exposed to an unconstrained will on the part of those in power. In particular, I shall assume that the legal protection is not provided at the whim of a benevolent autocrat or elite body. If it were provided on such a discretionary basis then it would not be fully protective: it would protect you from others in the society, but only at the cost of leaving you unprotected against the even greater danger that such an authority would represent.
+
+*Comparing unhindered and protected speech*
+
+… The distinction drawn has deep-running practical implications, which bear on the social meaning of free speech and on the political appeal of protecting and regulating it. Conceived as unhindered, free speech is a socially undemanding and a politically problematic ideal. Conceived as protected, it contrasts on both counts: socially, it imposes demanding requirements; politically, it constitutes a plausible goal…
+
+Unhindered speech is socially less demanding than protected speech because you can enjoy it just by virtue of others not actually interfering and not being likely to interfere. It does not matter that they have a power of interference against which you are not protected. So long as they do not actually impose on you, and are unlikely to do so, you have all the freedom of speech you could wish for. You may be a member of the beta class in a society where anyone in the alpha class can shut you up; you have no protection against them. But if those in the alpha class are indulgent towards you, letting you say what you wish, that means that you have the fullest form of freedom in this sense.
+
+If free speech means protected speech, however, then that is not so. For, to stick with the scenario just introduced, the alphas who refrain from interfering with you or other beta speakers still retain the power of interference; it is not as if they renounce or destroy that capacity. And so, you as a beta are not protected against them. You could enjoy free speech in the richer, protected sense, only to the extent that interference by any alpha was not so much unlikely as inaccessible. Alphas would have to face serious obstacles if they tried to interfere, finding that the option of interference was blocked entirely or burdened by various difficulties or costs…
+
+Unhindered speech is not only socially less demanding than protected speech; it is also politically more problematic. This is because any form of regulation, whether by officials of the state or of a subsidiary institution like a university, will be hostile as such to the ideal of unhindered speech: it will itself constitute a hindrance. A regulation against hate speech may do better overall by unhindered speech: it may prevent more interference than it perpetrates. But still, it will be hostile in itself to the ideal. While it may promise a number of steps forward in promoting free speech—this will always be a matter of relative probability—it will take one certain and decisive step backwards: it will itself impose on the freedom of certain speakers.
+
+The crucial observation here, central to the tradition of classical liberalism, is in the words of Jeremy Bentham (1843, p. 503) that “all coercive laws …are, as far as they go, abrogative of liberty”: that is, liberty conceived as the absence of interference. The observation explains the sense in which the ideal of free, unhindered speech is politically dubious. It means that the onus is on regulators to argue that although their initiatives certainly reduce some free speech, those measures promise to do better by free speech in the longer term. The default option is no regulation, then. Regulation will be triggered only in response to positive evidence that it may be necessary for achieving the maximum level of free speech.
+
+The ideal of free speech as protected speech is not politically problematic in the same way. On the contrary, it is an ideal that is entirely plausible, even inescapable, as a goal of law and regulation. It is only by dint of law and regulation—and supportive social norms—that speech gets to be protected, and gets to count as free. Assuming that the regime treats people as equals, as a public system will presumably be required to do, it will explicitly or implicitly protect those speech options that each can exercise and enjoy at the same time as others: those speech options, as we may say, that are co-exercisable and co-enjoyable (Pettit 2012, pp. 92–107).
+
+*The Attractions of Equating Free Speech with Protected Speech*
+
+The regulations designed to identify and protect co-exercisable, co-enjoyable speech options—the basic liberties of speech—may take any of a variety of forms. They will include regulations like Robert’s rules of order that prevent people speaking at will in a public gathering—and so avoid cacophony—but allow them to speak according to a certain schedule (Hart 1973). They will also include regulations that restrict speech options, criminalizing various forms of speech: for example, dangerous speech such as mischievously shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater; speech that invades the privacy of others, as that is culturally understood; and the sort of hate speech that would threaten public order and undermine the peace that speech requires. And they may also include regulations that allow tort remedies against speech that would expose someone to an unjustified loss of reputation and standing. Such regulations are designed to identify speech options that can be protected for all at once, enabling each to exercise their options at the same time as others and regardless of how many others take up those options at the same time, to enjoy exercising them.
+
+Although details of interpretation may be controversial, the regulations illustrated so far are all broadly plausible. But the requirement that the liberties of speech established in a society ought to include only speech options that are co-exercisable and co-enjoyable may argue for other, more surprising regulations.
+
+Thus, to take a salient example, the requirement would argue, in my view, against allowing the sort of anonymous commercial and political speech that currently dominates social media. In order for each to enjoy the exercise of free speech by others, they must be able to hold those others to account, testing them for how far their speech represents the unified, fact-responsive viewpoint of a responsible speaker. But anonymity of the kind that currently prevails on social media makes speech entirely uncheckable and unaccountable. Denying hearers the ability to distinguish between responsible speech and fake speech, it threatens to reduce speech on the social media to the role of a manipulative instrument designed to get in under the radar of interrogation and elicit purely emotive responses.
+
+The protection given to speech by the law may be provided in a number of ways. It may take the form of constitutional protection, as in the jurisdiction associated with the First Amendment of the United States. It may criminalize certain hindrances to speech. It may make measures of tort law available against purported hindrances, allowing plaintiffs to appeal to the courts. Or it may take a local form, as under the regulations of a particular institution like a university.
+
+Thus, on the equation of free speech with protected speech, public law is essential both for identifying the speech options to be protected and for providing the protection itself; the law that plays this role may be common across a society or may apply only within a certain institutional context. And that means that suitable laws do not constitute an invasion of free speech from without—even an invasion that is benign overall—as the alternative approach assumes. It means that law is part of what creates free speech: part of the infrastructure necessary for people to share in enjoyment of that ideal.
+
+If law is part of the infrastructure of free speech, of course, then the default position of those who embrace free speech cannot be no regulation. Rather it must be a commitment to identifying regulations that can provide the best infrastructure possible for free speech, protecting as many co-exercisable, co-enjoyable speech options as possible, establishing them as basic liberties of speech, and protecting those liberties in a suitably effective manner. What exact options should be protected as liberties, and in what measure they should be protected, is something for each legal system to determine, taking account of contextual and cultural considerations.
+
+Even Isaiah Berlin (1969, p. lx) acknowledges the constructive role of the law on this front when he says that “the area of men’s free action” often has to be “artificially carved out” by law. While the idea may not appeal to those who insist on seeing free speech as unhindered speech, it also has the stamp of authority. John Locke (1960, II.57), the great apostle of tolerance, argued in this vein that “where there is no law, there is no freedom”: that it is the law that defines the range of relevant choices, including the choices you or I have to speak our mind, and that then gives them the protection required for freedom. And in taking this line, Locke was supported by legal and political authorities in the following century, prior to the rise of the classical liberal view that Bentham helped to shape. Thus, in his canonical commentary on English law in the 1760s, Sir William Blackstone (1978, p. 126) made a point that would have been endorsed on all sides: “laws, when prudently framed, are by no means subversive but rather introductive of liberty; for (as Mr Locke has well observed) where there is no law there is no freedom.”
+
+References
+
+- Bentham, J. 1843. Anarchical Fallacies. The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 2, ed. J. Bowring. Edinburgh: W. Tait.
+- Berlin, I. 1969. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
+- Blackstone, W. 1978. Commentaries on the Laws of England. New York: Garland.
+- Hobbes, T. 1994. Leviathan, ed. E. Curley. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
+- Pettit, P. 2008. “Freedom and Probability: A Comment on Goodin and Jackson.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36 (2): pp. 206–20.
+- Pettit, P. 2012. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
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+---
+title: "Why Should Speech Be Free?"
+author: "Timothy Garton Ash"
+image: /img/tim-ash.jpg
+era: "Contemporary"
+topic: "Free Speech"
+draft: false
+---
+
+*The following is an excerpt from [“Free Speech: Ten Principles for A Connected World”](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Free-Speech-Principles-Connected-World-ebook/dp/B01B8H46NK/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Free+Speech%3A+Ten+Principles+for+A+Connected+World&qid=1572685805&s=digital-text&sr=1-1), by Timothy Garton Ash*
+
+**Why Should Speech Be Free?**
+
+[W]hy should speech be free? As soon as we start trying to hold governments to their word, or debate the proper limits of free speech, we find ourselves reaching for arguments that either underpin or call into question the terms of such treaties, laws and policies. Even if your instinct, like mine, is to say, ‘but of course speech must be free!’ it is still important to spell out why.
+
+The Western intellectual tradition has offered four main answers. Each comes with multiple philosophical, legal and literary variations, yet the basic thoughts are remarkably persistent. I call them in shorthand STGD: Self, Truth, Government, Diversity.
+
+***Self***
+
+The first argument is that we need freedom of expression to realise our full individual humanity. The power of speech is what distinguishes us from other animals and, thus far, from computers. If we are prevented from exercising it freely, we cannot fully be ourselves. That includes revealing ourselves to others, insofar as we wish to. Strapped into a straitjacket with a hood over my head and lips taped shut, I may inwardly reflect ‘my thoughts are free; you can’t take that away from me’. Yet even that innermost freedom of thought cannot entirely be separated from the freedom of expression. As anyone who writes or speaks will know, often you discover what you really think only in the process of speaking or writing. ‘The thought is made in the mouth’, said the Dadaist Tristan Tzara.1 Remember Syed Mahmood, spontaneously articulating to his home computer camera his reaction to the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ video.2 I will know what I definitely want to argue in this book only when I have finished writing it and discussed the draft with friends and critics.
+
+Moreover, even the most unbending liberal individualist must accept, as a description of lived reality, that I establish not just what I think but who I am through relations with other people. The Zulu proverb umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, which roughly translates as ‘a person is a person through other persons’, is sometimes understood as an African communitarian rebuke to European individualism, but it can simply be taken as the description of a human universal.3 It is precisely because we are not what Jeremy Waldron calls ‘the self-made atoms of liberal fantasy’ that we need the liberal good of freedom of expression, in communication with others, so as to be fully ourselves….
+
+Thomas Scanlon derives the case for free speech from the essential sovereignty of the individual. In order that we may regard ourselves as ‘equal, autonomous, rational agents’, Scanlon writes, we must be ‘sovereign in deciding what to believe and in weighing competing reasons for action’.5 Note that this focuses on the right of the listener to hear competing arguments and beliefs, rather than that of the speaker to express something. (Needless to say, ‘speaker’ and ‘listener’ are terms of art, embracing all forms of communication.) When we judge any claim for free speech, we have to keep in mind and sometimes balance these two things: the rights of and consequences for the speaker, and the rights of and consequences for the listener. Simone’s couplet brilliantly captures both: ‘I wish you could know / what it means to be me’….
+
+***Truth***
+
+Scanlon takes us to the doorstep of a second classic argument for free speech, which is that it enables us to find the truth. Or at least it helps us to seek the truth. After a century of totalitarian lies, and faced with chronic media manipulation even in liberal democracies, we may no longer share the magnificent confidence of Milton’s ‘let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?’ Even John Stuart Mill, who penned the most eloquent and influential version of the argument from truth in the English language, acknowledged that ‘it is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake’. But Mill argues—against censorship—that a suppressed opinion may turn out to be true and that, even if not altogether true, it may yet contain some grain of truth. Even supposing the received wisdom is one hundred percent correct, if it is never challenged it will come to be held ‘in the manner of a prejudice’, or what another writer called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’. ‘Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post’, writes Mill, ‘as soon as there is no enemy in the field’.7 So the good sword of truth will only be kept sharp if it is constantly tried against the axes and bludgeons of falsehood.
+
+The philosopher Bernard Williams acutely describes Mill’s notion as the ‘survival of the true’. It has had a huge influence on the whole Western tradition of thinking about freedom of expression.8 Together with his ‘harm principle’, it shapes free speech debates to this day. In the United States, this approach is characterised with the aid of another metaphor: the ‘marketplace of ideas’. The market comparison was popularised by the early-twentieth-century Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, although—as with so many famous quotations—he never used those exact words. But Holmes did argue, in a dissenting opinion in a 1919 Supreme Court case, ‘that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market’. In a seminal article entitled ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, Friedrich Hayek made a lucid case for markets (as opposed to central planners) and especially what he called the ‘marvel’ of the price system being the best way to arrive at certain kinds of truth…
+
+***Government***
+
+A third classic argument for free speech is that it is necessary for good government. Although American universities have discarded the teleological ‘from Plato to NATO’ self-congratulation of once-obligatory courses on ‘Western Civ’, it remains astonishing how the essence of our modern idea of free speech as a democratic public good is to be found almost fully formed 2,500 years ago, in Athens and some Greek colonies across the seas. Every citizen who desired to do so would gather in the designated assembly place of the city-state. In Athens, some 6,000 people came together on the gentle slopes of the pnyx, just off the Acropolis.12 ‘Who wishes to address the assembly?’ cried the herald.13 Then any free man could speak, outlining what he believed would be the best policy for that city-state and presenting his reasons for it. The best decisions and policies, it was claimed, would be arrived at by openly debating the alternatives, often ending with a vote. The ancient Greeks named this novel form of government ‘democracy’, meaning rule by the people…
+
+The ancient Greeks’ innovation of free speech for deliberative democracy embraces not one but two ideals, which they called parrhesia and isegoria. Parrhesia meant speech that was both free and fearless. The playwright Euripides has a mother wish that her sons should return to ‘glorious Athens, hold their heads high there, and speak their minds there like free men’. While the etymology of the word—from pan-rhesia, to say everything—might suggest unlimited speech, there was a strong presumption that the parrhesiast, the free-speaker, should say things he believed to be true and for the good of the community. The orator Demosthenes spoke of ‘the truth spoken with all freedom, simply in goodwill and for the best’. There was special licence for the arts, especially for comedy, but even Euripides deplored ‘hectoring and untutored parrhesia’.
+
+As important was isegoria, which meant equality of speech—or what, in the modern language of rights, we would call an equal right to speak. In another of his plays, Euripides has Theseus, the mythical king of Athens, explain that ‘freedom lives in this formula: “Who has good counsel which he would offer the city?” He who desires to speak wins fame; he who does not is silent. Where could greater equality be found?’ To be sure, this ur-equality applied only to free men, not to women, noncitizens or slaves, but the essential idea was there. Free and equal speech would allow deliberative democracy and that, the ancient Athenians believed, would produce better government. Indeed, the historian Herodotus maintained that it was because Athens had free speech that it became powerful and victorious…
+
+Pulling together some of these threads, an English judge wrote in a late-twentieth-century judgement that ‘freedom of speech is the lifeblood of democracy’. As Stephen Sedley points out, the word ‘lifeblood’ is particularly apt, since ‘free speech enables opinion and fact to be carried round the body politic’…
+
+***Diversity***
+
+A fourth major claim for free speech is particularly relevant to our emerging cosmopolis. Freedom of expression, it is argued, helps us to live with diversity. Although this strand does not figure so prominently in the modern Western classics on free speech, the germ of the idea is there at the very origins of modern liberalism. We can find it, for example, in the essays of John Locke and others about the need for ‘toleration’ in place of Europe’s wars of religion. We find it also in Immanuel Kant’s claim that human progress is best served not by the absence or suppression of conflict but by conducting that essential, creative conflict in peaceful, civilised ways.
+
+The American scholar Lee Bollinger has developed this thought. Drawing on the experience of the United States, with its long history of religious and ethnic diversity, he suggests that freedom of expression ‘tests our ability to live in a society that is necessarily defined by conflict and controversy; it trains us in the art of tolerance and steels us for its vicissitudes’.28 One could put the same point more positively, circling back to the first argument for speech. If everyone living in the same place or space is free to express herself or himself, then we have a better chance of understanding what, in that memorable phrase sung by Nina Simone, ‘it means to be me’—and you, and her, and him; John, Aisha or Ming. We will not all choose to live our lives in the same way. We will not all agree. As Kant observed, human society would be stagnant and bovine if we did. (Adam and Eve were probably bored stiff in the Garden of Eden.) But we can learn, by practice, how to live with irreducible difference and not come to blows. At best, we will agree on how we disagree.
+
+These four classic Western arguments—STGD—are combined by the former German Constitutional Court judge Dieter Grimm into a single pregnant formula: individual self-development and collective self-determination.
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+    <img src="{{.Params.image}}" width="120px" height="60px" style="vertical-align: middle; padding: 1px"/>
     {{end}}
-    <a href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .Title }}</a>
+    <time style="font-family: 'Courier'; font-weight: bold">{{.Date.Format "02 Jan 2006"}}</time> - <a href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .Title }}</a>
 </li>
diff --git a/themes/blackburn/static/css/blackburn.css b/themes/blackburn/static/css/blackburn.css
index 1aa5310..bc304fa 100644
--- a/themes/blackburn/static/css/blackburn.css
+++ b/themes/blackburn/static/css/blackburn.css
@@ -115,7 +115,7 @@ i {
   justify-content: left;
 }
 .micro-block {
-  width: 75px;
+  width: 140px;
   padding: 2px;
 }
 .small-block {