John Durham Peters:
A humble presentation by
Brent Roberts, COMT530
April 2007

• What is “free speech”?
• What is “the Abyss”?
• How do these ideas come together?

• “In the heart of every democrat since beats the pulse of Athens envy, and a desire to put on a toga and speak swelling oratory. The early modern era adds a new item of apparel and medium of communication to the mix: friends of democracy like to fancy themselves donning powdered wigs and taking quill in hand to compose declarations and encyclopedias that will set tyrants trembling.”

• “insistence on religious and other forms of ideological diversity”
• “rejection of conscious design as the ultimate source of social order”
• Respect for due process
• Respect for “equal protection against the tyranny of the majority”
• “appreciation for eccentric behavior”

• Moderns/liberals
– Committed 100% to free speech
• Fundamentalists
– Low threshold for disgust
– Sickened and offended
– Sensitive to violence and insult

• Why do they do it?
– If it doesn’t kill us, it makes us stronger
– “Showing off”
– Civic righteousness

“Liberal citizens are supposed to run the gauntlet of what disgusts them and to find a little poison gas in the air a good immunization against bigger woes.
Citizens grow in wisdom by passing through folly, and dalliance with demons adds up to the greater education of all.”

“Defending the speech we hate does not mean we need to learn to love it or think it is really good stuff. Refusing to make laws prohibiting speech and expression does not mean that speech and expression are necessarily free of ill effects.
One can oppose censorship while maintaining a capacity for judgments about the value and quality of cultural forms.”

• Heroes
– Big names: Milton, Mill, Locke, Thomas
Jefferson
– Today: Journalists, Librarians and ACLU
“Librarians are perhaps the most passionate believers in the free speech story in the
United States, with the ACLU.”

• What is it?
– “motor of democratic life”
– “nasty talk will call forth countervailing words of equal force and greater wisdom”

• Milton, Areopagitica (1644)
“Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter.”

• “worst of the intellectual frameworks commonly foisted on the essay”
• That “writing and reading should take place in an unrestricted, open-ended, and voluntary space, fair enough.”
• BUT……

Homeopathic Machismo and Free
Speech Theory
• Define homeopathy
• Define machismo
• Define homeopathic machismo
“The notion that a tincture of poison will lift us to heights of tolerance and civicmindedness.”

Emergence of the
“marketplace of ideas”
• 20 th Century
“The real grip on the public and legal imagination is held by the idea that we are righteous in proportion to our refusal to judge.”

“People whose livings and lives depend on the propagation of information and opinion in speech and text naturally believe theirs to be holy work.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes
(1841-1935)
• Fought in the Civil War
• Supreme Judicial Court of MA
• Supreme Court justice, 1902-1932
• “Great dissenter”
• Abrams (1919): “free trade in ideas”

• “most famous exponent of the idea that the first amendment’s purpose is to teach us to appreciate ideas that we hate”
• “consistent defense of the right of all parties to compete”
• “not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought of those we hate”

• Personal opinions
• Judicial opinions

• “He wanted a strong first amendment not because he thought more speech was the cure for bad speech, but because he wanted to leave the evolutionary battlegrounds uncluttered—like a Roman official making sure the gladiators all have water and bread before they head into combat.”

• Supreme Court 1916-1939
• Seen as radical
– Fought monopolies
– Fought to protect industrial laborers
(especially women)
– Defended individual human rights
– “Brandeis brief”

• Active discussion: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant”
• Noxious doctrine
• “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

“The peculiar righteous indignation of insisting on the other’s right to free speech, even at the risk of one’s own life, points to an emerging professional, selfsacrificial culture”

• Times v. Sullivan
• Cohen v. California
• Pacifica
• Hustler v. Falwell
• RAV v. St. Paul

• What is it?
• “call for a tender recognition of particular cultural traits and pains”
• Self-esteem and care
• “absolutist first amendment response to hate speech has the effect of perpetuating racism”
(Mari Matsuda)
• “rich and the educated consistently support free expression rights most vigorously…libertarian faith is a philosophy of the privileged”

“We need not be moral and intellectual Gumbies while we wait for the returns to come in on the gore and vomit that some of our liberal colleagues want to suspend judgment on. Life is too short to think we can postpone some decisions forever. Impersonality is, as Paul knew, a good norm to live by, but it does not mean that we stop fighting for decency in the meanwhile.”

“Watch, Therefore”: Suffering and the Informed Citizen
• Milton and Mill
• Today
• Two questions:
1.
“What is our responsibility to distant and local suffering?”
2.
“When, if ever, is it just to shut our eyes to the misery of the world?”

I.
Catharsis
II.
Compassion
III.
Courage

• Psychological relief
• Intellectual illumination
• Aroused to sympathy, called to action
• “Shut our eyes”

• “Distance is no excuse for ignorance”
• “Too much faith in human decency and due process keeps us unprepared to cope with the brutal realities of genocide”
• “People who could know, but do not bother, are implicated to some degree in the crime they could have helped prevent”

• “Pity is the totalitarianism of the righteous”
• “Distance furnishes clarity and catharsis”
• Pride and deception
• “Pity is a persuasive technique rather than an ethical virtue”

• Thoreau
• “We have to pay attention because the present is different from what was and what will be”
• “The past is solid, the future is gas, but the present is liquid”
• “Possible futures (and pasts) come into being or vanish with every event”

“The now will never leave us in peace.
Whether we pay attention to the news or ignore it, we will regret it either way.”

“Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time or place or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.”

• Evidence
• Self-denial, detachment, self-restraint
• Removes personal bias
• “Skepticism toward any and all firm beliefs”

Social Science: “chaste discourse”
• “colorless style of social scientific writing”
• Detached inquiry
• Franklin
• “Time, not contention, is the measure of truth; participants must restrain themselves and their passions in the quest for truth; discourse must be mellow, irenic, and civil.”

• Statistical analysis=“lingua franca of the social sciences”
• Data!
• Democracy is quantitative
• Reducing many voices to a single data summary
• “Numbers are democracy’s ideal language: suited for gods, machines, and collectives”

• Philip Marlowe, George Smiley, John
Wayne, Sherlock Holmes
• Doctors
• Journalists
• Enlightenment/spirituality

• “God’s-eye vide of a spectator of the drama of world history”
• “In our private choices we unwittingly promote something else”

• “Few people recognize the autonomy of events from their own willings and doings”
• Ignore individual fates
• Removes possessiveness, ego, sentimentalism
• “meaningfulness lies only in the aggregate”

• “Life experiences are, in a sense, artifacts of insufficient sampling”
• “illusions of selfhood”
• “statistical discipline teaches us to place the other before the self”

• Stories
– Fudge details
– Compress characters and events
– Teach the ethic of caring
• Statistics
– Tell it all
– Give us the grand pattern(s)
– Teach the ethic of not caring