> I've always admired how much the general population defends freedom of speech in the US.
I remember talking to a former coworker who had taken (or maybe taught) LL.M. classes at a law school with lawyers from all around the world (who were learning more about U.S. law as a form of continuing education). She said that she initially assumed that the foreign lawyers would be jealous of the U.S. first amendment (because the U.S. had succeeded in winning so much autonomy against the state, or against tyrannies of the majority), which is certainly the way many Americans would have learned to think about it growing up.
However, she found that most of the foreign lawyers were actually disturbed by or skeptical toward the first amendment, because they thought that some aspects of expression and communication were pretty dangerous and that it was an important function of the state to suppress or punish them.
As an American free speech activist, I was also extremely surprised by this!
One thing that's tricky is that there are several different reasons why people might be proud of or aspire to protecting speech, including:
- Free speech is a sign that your society is strong, peaceful, or successful, because it doesn't need to suppress subcultures or ideas by force. That suggests that the society is built, if not on consent, at least not on hiding something or getting people to pretend that they agree with things they don't. Conversely, censorship is a sign of weakness or fear, or an admission or clue that something is being covered up and people aren't being given a chance to investigate or think for themselves.
- Free speech is a human right that shows that you respect people's autonomy and conscience.
- Free speech is a mark of humility that shows that you accept for some purposes the possibility that you might be wrong or confused in ways that seem extremely unlikely or incomprehensible to you.
- Speech (and culture and belief) are areas of life that are not supposed to be regulated or controlled by the state (because they're too personal, they're too far from the things that states are really needed or appropriate for, or because they're used to define or understand the values and goals that people want the state to pursue in the first place).
- Free speech leads to good outcomes in some way (peace, understanding, progress, constructive deliberation, pluralism).
- Free speech prevents bad outcomes in some way (stagnation, totalitarianism, some abuses of power).
- Even though free speech might not always be that great, no state (or other entity) can be trusted to decide on the truth or the boundaries of acceptable discussion for everyone else.