The dangers of illiberal liberalism
economist.com
economist.com
He says he is a liberal “in the enlightenment sense.” He cites John Locke and John Stuart Mill.
But then he makes a “contrast”:
>In contrast, today’s so-called progressive liberals are often intolerant, calling for official censure against anyone perceived as uttering non-progressive views.
What the author fails to reconcile is that this “progressive liberal” target of his is all but the product of John Stuart Mill’s brand of liberalism that includes many wonderful things but has a certain clause that makes all the difference. Mill’s liberalism defended democratic ideals predominantly in cultural terms. That is, democracy to the extent that it does not interfere with free market capitalism.
Fast forward 150+ years through 2 world wars, the Great Depression, the federal reserve Vietnam, globalization, corporate takeover, etc., etc. and old Mill’s ideas are not looking so spiffy. The instability is anything but defensible, so what can the ole’ liberals do now but hunker down on the culturalism? There you have it.
There is nothing new or complicated about this. Mill and Marx defined the terms way back when.
The youngsters in the US are having trouble working through it because their parents skipped the conversation entirely, but they’ll figure it out. Fool them once.
So, this is not about free speech. The only problem here is this author’s insistence that it’s a contention between old and new. It’s not, of course. It’s a contention between capitalism, it’s glories, and messes it makes.
Read some Wittgenstein for a change: https://daily.jstor.org/wittgenstein-whether-speech-violence...
"Why do we describe hurtful words as a punch to the gut or a slap to the face? For so long, the free speech debate has been built upon an incoherent premise: that speech is powerful enough to solve social ills, but can’t inflict as much damage as a fist."
Because metaphor and analogy.
"You see, menudo is our chicken soup for the body and soul, our metaphor for bread-and-butter issues." That does not mean that menudo is actually soup, just like describing the effects of speech in that way does not mean that it is actual violence.
The fallacy you are committing is assuming that language and speech float in the ether. In fact language can best be described as a sort of pointer to a muscle movement, a reference to some bodily feeling. The ideal of "objective" meaning floating in air is nothing but an illusion.
"When something is "silly", this is an important sensation you should grasp at, not dismiss, because silliness is nothing but a reveal of your innermost biases."
Hmm...
If not, your own stress hormones are your own problem, no one else’s. Nuance, rather than black&white extremist thinking, is in order... assault is getting up in someone’s face. Battery is an act of physical violence. When we start conflating speech, assault and battery, the world is headed into the shitter.
No, speech is transmitted by the movement of air molecules. And the movement of these air molecules typically does no damage, unless amplified to absurd pressure levels.
> harms the body
Nope. A "cutting" comment produces no incisions in the body. I think you are also confusing "harms the body" with "feels like pain". There are studies that show that, for example, social exclusion produces a pain sensation in the brain that is hard to distinguish from physically caused pain.
However, that's not the same, just because there is a pain sensation as if you were physically harmed does not mean you were physically harmed. And no, the pain sensation is not the same as the actual physical harm. And yes, long-term cortisol exposure will cause negative effects on the body, but again not everything that causes harm is violence.
If I give you wrong directions, I am causing you harm, but that doesn't mean my directions are violence. If I drop a banana peel and you slip on it, that causes you harm, but it is not violence. The sun causes you harm, but the sun is not violence.
Under this definition of "speech" English, which I understand, and Chinese, which I don't, would have the same effect on me. But of course they don't. When somebody speaks in English or another language I understand, I have no choice but to hear it, not as noise, but as meaning, as sensations and memories activated in my brain and body.
Since you're German you probably like Kant. Korsgaard is a Kantian philosopher at Harvard: "If I say to you, “Picture a yellow spot!” you will. What exactly is happening? Are you simply cooperating with me? No, because at least without a certain active resistance you will not be able to help it. Is it a causal connection then? No, or at least not merely that, for if you picture a pink spot you will be mistaken, wrong. Causal connections cannot be wrong. What kind of necessity is this, both normative and compulsive? It is obligation. " https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/k/korsgaar... p.78
What on earth leads you to make such a fallacious statement?
> no choice but to hear it
Sort of. You can wear ear-protection, turn on the music of your headphones, but overall it is arguably a bug of our physiology that we cannot close our ears the same way we can close our eyes.
> If I say to you, “Picture a yellow spot!” you will.
No, not necessarily. Also, this is not because speech is a command, but because we interpret speech automatically. So if I tell you "Whatever you do, do not picture a pink elephant", you will nevertheless think of a pink elephant, counter to the command I gave you.
And of course, if I say "Jump off the bridge", you will probably not do so, because, again, it's not that speech is a command, but that we interpret speech more or less automatically.
Anyway, no idea what any of this has to do with the question of whether speech is violence.
> Since you're German you probably like Kant.
Stereotype much?
Very good, you almost grasped my point. In fact you even managed to produce spontaneously one of the most famous examples of this principle by the great philosopher George Lakoff (read "Don't Think of an Elephant!", which was used for Clinton's campaign)
> we interpret speech more or less automatically
This is more or less my point. Speech is interpreted automatically: it is not a choice to interpret it, or not. In cases of drastic power imbalance -- again, for example, parental emotional abuse of child -- the person on the receiving end of "violent speech" has no choice to not interpret whatever hate and bigotry the speech consists of. So "free speech" ends up encroaching on others' freedom: again, the listeners have no choice but to have their semantic lightbulbs activated.
Sometimes, ironically, the belief that humans can always make choices, ends up creating less choices for humans..
> Stereotype much?
:)
Hmm...try to think for a second. Which do you think is more likely: (a) that I "spontaneously" produced this famous example, or (b) that I am actually quite familiar with the field in general and Lakoff's work in particular, for example by having studied linguistics?
Hmmm...
Rest assured that I disagree with you not out of ignorance of the point you are trying to make, but by knowing the point quite well and disagreeing with it, because it is incoherent.
As I explained before, you are combining two very distinct things, first the more or less autonomous speech processing that we do and second the longer term effects, positive and negative. These two are not the same at all.
Don't worry, I wasn't actually impressed, I was just trying to give you a compliment. (It sounds like you need one.) Yes, you've probably read a NYT article on Lakoff. But that does not count as "studying linguistics".
> As I explained before, you are combining two very distinct things, first the more or less autonomous speech processing that we do and second the longer term effects, positive and negative. These two are not the same at all.
So let's say automatic speech processing exists. (you admit as such.) Now combine this with: if somebody says A to me, over and over again, A will keep on being activated in my brain via automatic speech processing. Over time this automatic processing gets so engrained, it carves out a robust neural pathway that is not easily diverted. Note, I had no choice in this situation. It was not as if I asked a doctor to carve this particular neural pathway in my brain. No, the situation was rather some other person, with his/her own agenda, repeating A to me over and over again until A is literally part of me.
The parallel to violence is that both take away human freedom. Of course speech isn't the exact same thing as a fist. Of course I can't punch you in the face with these words, however much I may or may not want to. :) The point isn't that they're the same; the point is that they're not as neatly separable as you seem to believe.
Maybe you thinking along the lines of "either speech is violence, or speech is not violence". I am saying that this very framework is wrong. Speech and violence do not have a is-a (or is-not-a) relation between them. They have a much more complicated relation between them.
Nope.
> But that does not count as "studying linguistics".
You're right, it doesn't. Studying linguistics counts as "studying linguistics". If you don't know what "studying linguistics" means, I really can't help you.
Second, you've been practicing full-out ideological flamewar. HN is not a place for that. It's a place for intellectual curiosity. The two are not compatible, in the same way that gardens are not compatible with scorched earth. We have many years of experience with what happens on the internet when people flame each other like this, or try to take the culture of rough-and-tumble argument into a large public forum. It leads to the destruction of the community, so we have to be proactive about moderating it. Please use HN for thoughtful, substantive discussion, not smiting enemies.
If you'd review the site rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to them, we'd appreciate it.
Please don't be uncivil on HN. We've had to ask you this many times before. If you can't or won't control this impulse, we're going to end up banning you. Please don't do it again.
You may not owe better to each other, but you owe better to this community, which only exists as a place for thoughtful discussion because most people restrain themselves.
The context was "... Which do you think is more likely: (a) ... (b) ...."
So it wasn't "you @#$, can't you even THINK for a goddarn second?!", but "hey, when you take a moment to consider, which of these do you see as more likely", which I have a hard time seeing as uncivil.
Of course, your site, your rules and your interpretation of those rules. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nope, wrong again. I am talking about cases where abusive speech is systematic, unescapable, and occurring in the context of a drastic power imbalance. Parental child abuse, for example. I can point you to countless studies where parental child abuse leads to physically harmed bodies, harm here consisting of chronic unmitigated pain, autoimmune disorders, even brain tumors. For a start, try "The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel van der Kolk
> If I drop a banana peel and you slip on it, that causes you harm, but it is not violence.
This part of your reply was too silly to even warrant a reply.
You are the one setting up a straw man. The article does not say (nor do I): "speech causes harm, if x causes harm, x is violence, therefore speech is violence", which is what you are arguing ("not everything that causes harm is violence"). Violence, obviously, is meaningless unless there is some person behind the violent act. This is why your silly sentence "bananas are literally violence" is incoherent: you are confusing an act (speech) with a thing (banana).
You are constructing a meta-straw-man by construing me as a straw-man construer.
The problem originates thin-skinned toddler with their safe-spaces, microaggressions and crybully reactionary-outrage, brow-beating BS, which mostly grew out of the hierarchy of victimhood anti-white-straight-male ideologues, ... compounded by faculty, staff and parents whom fail to correct them, set sensible boundaries and lead-by-example.
Yes, clearly Wittgenstein is less of a philosopher than the author of this article.
Look, I get what you're worrying about. Yes, there is a dark history where totalitarian regimes suppressed people from free speech. Nobody wants to go back there. What I'm pointing out is that "free speech" as implemented in the current society is not without its glaring defects, and that to get to the next stage of progress we need a subtler idea of free speech, rather than this clearly incoherent "speech is powerful enough to cure social ills, but cannot inflict as much damage as a fist."
Just to spell it out for you again, under any reasonable metric, the desirability hierarchy is:
totalitarian suppression of free speech < "free speech" in the liberal world as we know it < a more nuanced understanding of "free speech", with bug fixes
There is nothing incoherent about this, except your mischaracterization.
The fist inflicts. Speech does not inflict, it informs, entices and incites. And when it incites it can already be regulated. Yes, there are involuntary aspects of speech processing, but these are not generally and certainly not immediately harmful. For speech to be powerful it requires the consent/cooperation of the spoken-to. The fist does not.
So you are constructing a straw man out of logical incoherence and then having a big old fight with it.
Have fun!
This is where you are wrong.
You already admitted that there are involuntary aspects of speech processing, and this is a step in the right direction.
Your mistake is dismissing how powerful these involuntary aspects are, and this mistake probably stems from your irrational faith in human agency despite all odds.
The same insults and threats hurled at you by a person in a position of power have a very different meaning when coming from someone powerless.
Likewise promises from somebody trustworthy are much more powerful than from a stranger.
My point being: it's not the speech that's powerful, it's the person behind it.
As for the parent comment, possibly it was downvoted because it used ideological tropes. HN is not a place for ideological battle (regardless of what you're battling for/against), because ideological battle tends to burn up everything else.
Edit: looks like you did it again here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17794513. Please don't post like that to HN.
The point is that denying trans people (for example, as they're targeted the worst by both rightwingers, "centrists" and some lefties aka trans-exclusionary radical feminists) the right to choosing freedom over their bodies is a direct attack on their basic human right to exist. Either one supports letting trans people live in peace or one does not - and the latter position is directly and actively intolerable in a society that calls itself "civilized" and "respecting human rights".
There is no valid position in any society that denies a group of people the right to exist. We had that already with the Nazi regime and with Stalin's Soviet Union, no need to repeat history again.
This is reality, there's a reason why suicide and self harm ratios are enormous among LGBT, especially youth.
Do you think the child has a soul separate from the body that the parents won't be able to touch? Do you think the child has a clean innocent soul that's immune to harm?
The "knife" comment was a crude, terribly crude, reference to a "transitioning" operation.
Again, I am not condoning the crude language and possible actions, but among those I don't see "denying the right to exist".
Objecting to use of bathrooms is not denying the right to exist.