Newsletter

January 2015

Three reasons to affirm free speech

Steven Pinker

A few years ago I
wrote a chapter on taboo language which began, “It’s no coincidence that freedom
of speech is enshrined in the first of the ten amendments to the Constitution
that make up the Bill of Rights, because freedom of speech is the foundation of
democracy.” It didn’t take long for a historian to write to me, saying,
“Actually, it is a coincidence.” Originally, the framers had framed
twelve amendments, of which the one guaranteeing free speech was third. The
first two, which dealt with how congressmen were paid and other housekeeping
issues, failed to pass, resulting in the third amendment being promoted to
first.

It serves me right
for assuming that history provides us with neat symbolism that makes for cute
chapter openings. Still, I could have written, “It’s fitting that the
constitutional guarantee of free speech is the first of the ten amendments,”
because free speech is indeed the foundation of democracy—and, as I hope to
remind you this evening, much else that is worthwhile in life.

Persuading this
audience that free speech is a good thing is a bit like Mitt Romney preaching to
a certain musical ensemble in Salt Lake City. But the value of free speech is
still very much worth affirming. There are good reasons why the people in this
room fetishize free speech, and we should have the reasons at our fingertips
when we are called upon to justify this fetish. Tonight I’d like to remind you
of three of them.

First, free speech
is the only way to acquire knowledge about the world. Perhaps the greatest
discovery in human history—one that is logically prior to every other
discovery—is that all of our traditional sources of belief are in fact
generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. These
include faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, augury, prophesy,
intuition,
clairvoyance,
conventional wisdom, and the warm glow of subjective certainty.

How, then, can we
know? Other than by proving mathematical and logical theorems, which are not
about the material world, the answer is the process that Karl Popper called
conjecture and refutation. We come up with ideas about the nature of
reality, and test them against that reality, allowing the world to falsify the
mistaken ones. The “conjecture” part of this formula, of course, presupposes the
exercise of free speech. We offer conjectures without any prior assurance they
are correct. It is only by bruiting ideas and seeing which ones withstand
attempts to refute them that we acquire knowledge.

Once this
realization sank in during the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Reason, and the
Enlightenment, the traditional understanding of the world was decimated.
Everyone knows that the discovery that the Earth revolves around the sun rather
than vice-versa had to overcome fierce resistance from common sense and
ecclesiastical authority. But the Copernican revolution was just the first event
in an cataclysm that would make our current understanding of the world
unrecognizable to our ancestors.

We now know that
the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their
theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken.
We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of
African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its
history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that
embraces all living things and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four
billion years ago. We know that we live on a planet that revolves around one of
a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion
galaxies in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe, possibly one of a vast number of
universes. We know that our intuitions about space, time, matter, and causation
are incommensurable with the nature of reality on scales that are very large and
very small. We know that the laws governing the physical world (including
accidents, disease, and other misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human
well-being. There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses,
augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers—though the discrepancy between
the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people
believe there are. And we know that we did not always know these things, that
the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified,
doubtless including some we hold today.

Free speech was not
just central to the development of
knowledge in the history of humanity; it may be central to the development of
knowledge in any intelligent species. In his brilliant book The Beginning of
Infinity,the physicist David Deutsch argues that conjecture and refutation
is the only way, in principle, that knowledge can be acquired. If he is right,
we can rule out that staple of science fiction, the advanced race of
extraterrestrials with a higher form of intelligence. There is only one form of
intelligence, Deutsch argues, and modern humans have it: a combination of the
ability to conjecture hypotheses, which is part of our evolved cognitive makeup,
and the willingness to let the world refute them, which is an accomplishment of
the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. If so, the freedom to advance
ideas is not just a parochial ideal of Homo sapienson Planet Earth; it
is an ideal of all intelligent beings.

The second reason
that free speech is foundational to human flourishing is that it is essential to
democracy and a bulwark against tyranny. The most pressing historical question
of the twentieth century is how monstrous totalitarian regimes, particularly
those of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Imperial Japan, came into existence. There are
a number of conjectures, such as the popular libertarian hypothesis that
societies with extensive social welfare systems and copious government
regulation are likely to slide down a slippery slope into totalitarianism. It’s
an interesting hypothesis with a major flaw: nothing of the sort has ever
happened.

Instead, fascist
and communist regimes come to power through violent intimidation. In every case,
groups of armed fanatics used violence to silence or intimidate their critics
and adversaires. (Even the apparently democratic election of the Nazis in 1933
was preceded by years of intimidation, murder, and violent mayhem.) And once in
power, totalitarians criminalize any criticism of the regime.

There’s a
systematic reason why dictators brook no dissent. The immiserated subjects of a
tyrannical regime are not deluded that they are happy. And if tens of millions
of disaffected citizens act together, no regime has the brute force to resist
them. The reason that citizens don’t resist their overlords en masse is that
they lack what logicians call common knowledge—the knowledge that
everyone else shares their knowledge. Common knowledge is a prerequisite to
coordinating behavior for mutual benefit: two friends will show up at the same
café at a given time only if each knows that the other knows that both know
about the appointment. In the case of civil resistance, people will expose
themselves to the risk of reprisal by a despotic regime only if they know that
others are exposing themselves to that risk at the same time.

Common knowledge is
created by public information, such as a broadcasted statement. The story of the
Emperor’s New Clothes illustrates the logic. When the little boy shouted that
the emperor was naked, he was not telling them anything they didn’t already
know, anything they could not see with their own eyes. But he was changing the
state of their knowledge nonetheless, because now everyone knew that everyone
elseknew that the emperor was naked. And that common knowledge emboldened
them to challenge the emperor’s authority with their laughter.

In his computer
simulations of artificial societies, the sociologist Michael Macy has shown that
open channels of communication are essential in preventing unpopular
beliefs—those that no one believes but no one dares deny—from becoming
entrenched. If true believers can punish skeptics, then a minority view can take
over. But if skeptics can sample the beliefs of their compatriots, the
collective delusions can unravel.

It may seem
outlandish to link American campus freedom—which by historical and global
standards is still admirably high—to the world’s brutal regimes. But I’m here to
tell you that the connection is not that far-fetched. This morning I woke up in
Oslo, after having addressed the Oslo Freedom Forum, a kind of TED for political
dissidents. I met people who escaped from North Korea by walking across the Gobi
desert in winter; people who were jailed for a single tweet; people whose
families were thrown in prison because of their own political activity. These
stories put the relatively minor restrictions on campus speech in perspective.
But the American commitment to unfettered speech, unrivaled even by our
democratic allies in Europe, stands as a beacon of inspiration to the world’s
dissidents, one of the few features of the American brand that still commands
global admiration. At least one speaker at the Forum singled out speech codes
and other restrictions on expression in the United States as a worrisome
development.

The third
reason that
free speech
is fundamental
to civilized societies—and
the one
most directly
tied to the mandate of FIRE—is that it is inseparable from the mission of higher
education. Today’s universities are racked with debates on curricula,
admissions, funding, pedagogy, sexuality, and much else, and all of them
ultimately hinge on an understanding of what universities are for. As the song
says, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” But
I have been astonished at how professors, deans, and university presidents
cannot come up with a coherent statement of what the mission of a university is.
When called upon to do so they go all misty, babbling in incoherent platitudes.

A good example is
William Deresiewicz’s recent book Excellent Sheep, a bestseller whose
excerpt in The New Republicquickly became the most-read article in the
century-long history of that magazine. In this scathing critique of elite
universities, Deresiewicz ventures that the goal of a university education is
for students to “build a self,” which he explicates as follows: “It is only
through the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart,
the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul.”

This vision, to the
extent that one can make sense of it, is troubling. Though I’ve been a professor
for more than three decades, I have no idea how to get students to acquire a
self or build a soul. It isn’t taught in graduate school, and we’ve never
evaluated a candidate for hiring or promotion by how well he or she can
accomplish it. Indeed, if “acquiring a self” has something to do with adult
responsibility, moral sophistication, or the ability to reason through the
inherent conflicts in human condition, contemporary universities are falling
over themselves to prevent students from doing acquiring one. The
students at elite universities today are encouraged to prioritize music,
athletics, and other forms of recreation over their academic duties. They may be
disciplined by an administrative board with medieval standards of jurisprudence,
pressured to sign a kindness pledge suitable for kindergarten, muzzled by speech
codes that would not pass the giggle test if challenged on First Amendment
grounds, and publicly shamed for private emails that express controversial
opinions.

In any case, the
commonly expressed idea that a university education is a form of “soulcraft” is
not as anodyne as it first seems. Indeed, I find it creepy, because it licenses
moralistic propaganda and a condescending disregard for students’ critical
faculties. I say that students’ souls are none of our business. A concern with
soulcraft distracts us from a more coherent, defensible, and practicable
understanding of the mission of the university—one in which free speech is an
inseparable part.

Let me be specific.
It seems to me that educated people should know something about the
13-billion-year prehistory of our species and the basic laws governing the
physical and living world, including our bodies and brains. They should grasp
the timeline of human history from the dawn of agriculture to the present. They
should be exposed to the diversity of human cultures, and the major systems of
belief and value with which people have made sense of their lives. They should
know about the formative events in human history, including the blunders we can
hope not to repeat. They should understand the principles behind democratic
governance and the rule of law. They should know how to appreciate works of
fiction and art as sources of aesthetic pleasure and as impetuses to reflect on
the human condition.

On top of this
knowledge, a liberal education should make certain habits of rationality second
nature. Educated people should be able to express complex ideas in clear writing
and speech. They should appreciate that objective knowledge is a precious
commodity, and know how to distinguish vetted fact from superstition, rumor, and
unexamined conventional wisdom. They should know how to reason logically and
statistically, avoiding the fallacies and biases to which the untutored human
mind is vulnerable. They should think causally rather than magically, and know
what it takes to distinguish causation from correlation and coincidence. They
should be acutely aware of human fallibility, most notably their own, and
appreciate that people who disagree with them are not necessarily stupid or
evil. Accordingly, they should appreciate the value of trying to change minds by
persuasion rather than intimidation or demagoguery.

I believe (and
believe I can persuade you) that the more deeply a society cultivates this
knowledge and mindset, the more it will flourish. And so, with the conviction
that free speech is essential to the acquisition of knowledge, to the
flourishing of a humane democracy, and to the mission of higher education, I
salute the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, its founders, Harvey
Silverglate and Alan Kors, its director, Greg Lukianoff, and all of you who give
it your generous and essential support.

Portions of this address were adapted
from my New Republic essays “Science is not Your Enemy” (2013) and “The
Trouble with Harvard” (2014).

Steven Pinker is
professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

FIRE, October 23, 2014.