The Echo Chamber Is the Enemy of Democracy
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
That's revisionist history.
Buckley allowed Noam Chomsky on his show once, sure. But I'd hardly call him "more than willing" to let Chomsky get his ideas across. He was constantly interrupting him. At the end of the interview Buckley even went so far as pressing a button to go to commercial in order to keep from having to answer one of Chomsky's questions.
"Providing a forum" would be what Amy Goodman did by allowing the 9-11 truthers to debate the Popular Science guys on Democracy Now. That's the standard, and Buckley's interview of Chomsky on Firing Line doesn't live up to that standard.
Some key takeaways:
- There just aren't many instances where people are actually being uninvited or censored on an absolute scale.
- It's actually spread across the ideological spectrum, not solely limited to conservative speakers.
- A tiny handful of conservative speakers are responsible for a significant number of these events, and in fact it appears that to some degree the point of inviting them is trolling, intended to draw protest and press attention, rather than a genuine attempt to present.
Personally, I think major news organizations offering their imprimatur to self-proclaimed fascists who advocate for limiting or destroying democratic governance might be more harmful to democracy than colleges refusing to host talks by people who traffic in trolling and bigotry. But that's just me.
I also think it's useful to consider Sarte's quote about the utility of "debating" anti-Semites:
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
and how that same pattern plays out frequently in the high-profile interviews and debates with people like Bannon and Spencer.
It's not just you. There are plenty of fascist minded extreme leftists who are working hard to censor everything they don't like. Luckily, most americans can see through that. It's pathetic to label everything you disagree with as "trolling and bigotry". And it's fascistic to try to silence them.
I find it so ironic that the "anti-fascists" are the real fascists in today's america.
If these conservatives are so laughable, let them speak so that we can all laugh at them. But I guess free speech and intellectual honesty is a bit too much to ask nowadays.
It's weird that this is the point of the opinion piece in this context. We're talking about a guy who built his fame on selling sensationalism to his own echo chamber and never showed one iota of humility.
I agree we could all use a little bit more humility, but we're not going to get there by hearing from someone whose talking points are not based on fact, but on appealing to emotion.
If you want someone with an opposing viewpoint at the festival, find someone more sincere. To borrow an example from the article, even if you disagree with Noam Chomsky, you can still trace back his opinion to the facts that informed it. You didn't see Buckley debating people on Firing Line who completely fabricated stories.
1. We do not know what is good for us. We only know what we like and don't like. (We know this because we can look back in our own lives to times in which we did what we liked and it was not as good as if we had did something else, sometimes disastrously so.)
2. Many times we have to be annoyed by ideas and other concepts we don't like for a while until we realize that there is some bit of great value here for us.
The logical conclusion to points 1 and 2 is this: there is some degree of being annoyed that is a normal and healthy part of living. Too much aggravation? Probably not. But you can definitely have too little. Too little aggravation would be far, far worse than too much, in fact.
So goods and services that seek to reduce/eliminate everything we don't like are not actually acting in our best interests, whether they're some social media tech or a new brand of opioid. A bit of this kind of thing at the appropriate time is great. Too much is disastrous.
Long watch but quite relevant and interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg4IqrIpuQU&t=2440s
Democracy is a political system. You can have a democracy coexist with as many "echo chambers" as you please. (In fact, in a healthy democracy, you would have "echo chambers"). The reality is that "echo chambers" created the conditions that allowed Trump to be elected. But, he was ELECTED. The democratic process worked fine.
What I'm trying to, gently, point out, is that "echo chambers" not giving you the democratic results you want, is not the same as "echo chambers" being an "enemy" of democracy. Everyone can say whatever they please. Everyone can listen to, or indeed, ignore, whatever they please. Simultaneously, along a completely different and orthogonal axis, everyone can vote however they please. Now obviously in such an environment, if there really is complete freedom of choice and freedom of association, "echo chambers" will develop. This doesn't show a lack of freedom, rather it shows an abundance of freedom. Any person is free to position themselves wherever they please in the space defined by that democratic environment.
Freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom of association etc, these are some of the most important features of a democracy. So "echo chambers" don't represent a threat to democracy. Quite the contrary, their existence actually indicates the presence of healthy environment in terms of democratic freedoms.
Now of course people won't like this, because it allows the ill informed to remain ill informed as long as they choose. But that goes back to freedoms. As horrible as this is going to sound, it's the democratic right of the ill informed, to remain ill informed.
It would have to be worded carefully, e.g "what does THINK_TANK believe will happen to the economy under Trumps tax plan" (as opposed to "what is likely to happen under Trumps tax plan", so there would be no political disagreements) and it would of course have to be applied equally to everybody (no grandfathering).
But the question I am really asking is, would it be so bad if the number of eligitable voters were smaller, but they were more informed?
1. If it's the ruling party, then there's no way they would write unbiased questions.
2. If it's the opposition party, then there's no way they would write unbiased questions.
3. If it's a combination of the two, then no questions would get written in time.
4. If it's a third party, then who vets/selects them, and who can be a part of it? GOTO 1
> But the question I am really asking is, would it be so bad if the number of eligitable voters were smaller, but they were more informed?
That's incredibly dangerous. Who decides who is 'informed' and not? I bet most (all?) voters think they are informed.
Each question would be assigned some score, and you would need a certain minimum to pass.
As long as everybody is given the same test, and that the questions are objective, the same determination would be made for everybody, no matter what their political leanings were, so in a sense whatever knowledge you require your opponents to know, you would also your side to know.
Even if it is so blatantly biased that every single question is a positive statement about Hillary (say), wouldn't you want somebody voting against her to do so on an informed basis, and so as a minimum they should know her platforms/positions?
You're giving people too much credit. When showed the controversial comparison photos of Obama's and Trump's inauguration crowds and asked which photo depicted a larger crowd, some Trump supporters indicated the Trump inauguration simply because they recognized the controversy and refused to give any credence to the perceived insult, even going so far as to give an obviously false answer on an ostensibly objective poll.
Disturbingly, most of the controversies involve people whose views are to the right of center.
...
Nor did Buckley think that all ideas deserve a forum. He did not host defenders of astrology, the Ku Klux Klan, Nazism or Soviet-style Communism.
Does anyone of any note to the left of center advocate for Soviet-style Communism?
If the worst views he can conjure from the left are a right-wing scare story and astrology, whereas the worst on the right are murderous ideologies, then I think the first paragraph kinda explains itself.
I understand what you’re saying, but if this unequal silencing is so obviously a real phenomenon and isn’t simply a reflection of the views being espoused - then it should be easy for the author to come up with examples. And it’s not just this author. It’s every author I’ve read commenting on this ‘phenomenon.’ They always say that it’s right-wing voices being silenced, but never suggest what left-wing voices should be silenced that aren’t.
So I invite anyone to suggest the left-leaning equivalents of Nazism and white-supremacy.
(And by equivalents I don’t just mean viewpoints, I mean comparable levels of influence. Some random bloke on the web claiming to be left-leaning and saying that their race is superior to whites isn’t the equivalent of white-supremacy as a movement.)
It would depend on exactly how precisely you define "Soviet-style Communism". If you mean, matching the exact same structure and the exact same beliefs and the exact same propaganda and national narrative, no, of course not. If you mean "people advocating for the State to be the one and only source of authority over everything economic, social, and cultural", then, yes, absolutely there are people on the left advocating for this. Quite a few explicitly, and even more people who do not quite entirely realize they are advocating for it, but when asked any specific question about who should have some given authority, the answer is always the State, even if they hypothetically believe that there must be some question for which that is not the answer.
I'm a leftist and pretty widely read and I've yet to read anyone explicitly advocating for state control of the whole economy. For pieces of it, such as Health Care or Education? Sure. For better regulation and wider redistribution? Yep. For municipal control of public utilities? Yep. Even for municipal or state level public alternatives to certain pieces of the economy, like banking.
For the whole thing, Soviet-style? Nope. I haven't seen this anywhere.
So who, exactly, is advocating for that?
I know a lot of people who would absolutely describe Bannon as similar to Nazis or Soviets, who feel very strongly that his "white nationalist" views are likely to lead to a genocide. It's pretty widely know that the last subject of these "free speech" uproars, Milo Yiannapolous, flirted pretty openly with Nazi-style beliefs--and that Bannon was the one who gave him a platform in the first place.
If you disagree with Bannon being put in that category, you have a responsibility to at the very least explain why he's not there. Otherwise you're just cultivating willful ignorance, deliberately refusing to engage with others' arguments. Creating your own echo chamber, one could say.
Untruth. Lies. Total fiction mascaraing as fact. Such things should be denied the dignity of a university podium. People who want to poke holes in climate models are one thing, people who believe the earth is getting warmer due to a giant dragon hiding behind the moon are another. People who believe Obama was a lizard-person sent by Bin Laden to undermine gun rights ... such "alternative facts" deserve no place on a campus dedicated to learning.
I laughed. Back in 1998 I attended a lecture that I though was about evidence of aliens messing with our DNA. What I got was intelligent design as proof that the bible was literally correct. Most laughed, but many did not. Students believe what they are told. Not all of them all of the time, but a significant percentage will believe anything they hear so long as it reinforces their world view.
It's not so much protecting people, is ensuring their mental energies can be put toward productive measures rather than swimming through falsehoods for the sake of it.
If sufficient people are interested in a speaker/idea, isn't it best to let them speak and trust people to draw their own conclusions based on the information presented?
Yes, and whoever is making that determination gains great power. It is very easy to use this power of censorship to push an agenda. Arguments have many nuances and are rarely completely true or completely false.
Until we have a benevolent oracle that can determine whether an argument represents objective truth, free and open speech is our best option.
Telling that you're so quick to hyperbole here - of course nobody has actually been invited to speak at a college who believed that Obama was a "lizard person". People like Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones and Jordan Peterson have been invited and subsequently disinvited due to backlash, though, and I'm pretty sure those are the people you're backhandedly referring to. But they don't say that Obama was a lizard person. They do say that he was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii, that he's a muslim rather than a Christian, and that he's a socialist rather than a capitalist. Ironically, because these things are, at least, believable, when you say that they're no longer up for debate and won't even discuss whether or not their up-for-debate status is up for debate, you actually make it look like they _are_ true. Suppressing plausible conspiracy theories makes them seem more plausible, which is doubly distressing when they're conspiracy theories that are so easily debunked.