The Free Speech Delusion
There is no such thing as true freedom of expression
Perhaps it’s just my continental sensibilities, but the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor seems a bit too, well, capitalist to my taste.
“Oh, your political stance looks kinda fresh sir, but I just discovered this other guy offering it for less.”
"That vendor over there has even bigger ideas than you, and he has managed to produce them more efficiently, so I gonna go with him, sorry.”
I know, I know, this is not very charitable. But this slight intercultural misunderstanding between a European commie like me and mercantilistic Anglo parlance already hints at the problem: our understanding, and our ability to exchange ideas, depends on our core narrative framework: our background assumptions, our sacred presuppositions.
“Free speech” is only possible within such a context of shared, often unconscious core tenets. Straying too far from those as an individual will get you ostracized and might well drive you mad; straying too far as a group will lead to metaphysical warfare.1
You can currently see this dynamic play out with the Israel issue: as Glenn Greenwald rightly points out, a great number of conservatives who have made a career calling out cancel culture and censorship, overnight switched to calling for cancellation and censorship. That’s because the issue touches one of their core beliefs, which they perceive as existential with every fiber of their being.
Just as a man who feels cornered and fears for his life or that of his loved ones won’t organize a gentlemanly boxing match to defend himself but rather lash out with everything he got, rules be damned, so a man who feels his core assumptions threatened will forget all lofty ideals about the free exchange of ideas and simply seek to crush his opponent in whatever way available to him.
Every society at any given time has a set of these “absolute presuppositions” (as R.G. Collingwood called those sacred assumptions), which are so deeply internalized that they appear to its members as straight-forward features of reality, as hard and eternal as a mountain ridge. But a closer look at history reveals that these presuppositions change over time, sometimes dramatically so. It’s just that we take ours to be true, while those older ones we “know” to be superstitious, false, and morally reprehensible. However, even if we don’t see it that way, and indeed long for some of the belief structures of the past, we can’t help but think along the lines carved into our time and place by the zeitgeist. It’s the water we swim in, of which we must make use if we want to move at all. Free speech presupposes such water.
How, then, can the core beliefs of our society change? Collingwood, very much under the influence of early 20th century thought and the German tradition, suggested that such change is more like a natural process: assumptions come “under strain” as new ideas emerge, old beliefs are challenged by new developments, new insights or new discoveries, until the old structure bursts, establishing new core assumptions, the very basis and limit of a society’s ability to think.
According to the old teleological philosophy, nations, peoples, societies and empires have destinies: the forces at work are, to a great extent, beyond their control. Note that in the minds of these thinkers, this isn’t about a “mechanism” or an “economic law” or such, but about the soul of a group on its way towards its destiny. Accordingly, Oswald Spengler, for instance, thought our best hope will be a “beautiful sunset” as our civilization inevitably evaporates, whereas more revolutionary-minded people at his time sought to radically lean into their group’s destiny to produce a new epoch in which their people, nation or culture dominates for the benefit of all. That we find it so hard to grasp such ideas today is another example of how we can’t help but think in terms of our own, contemporary assumptions.
Given that picture, it’s hard not to see free speech and the “marketplace of ideas” as naive at best, a complete delusion at worst. Framing it more positively, true free speech presupposes quite a few things:
A deep, all-encompassing interest in truth, in getting to the bottom of things, in spiritual and intellectual growth, in developing an ever more fine-grained understanding of reality, its dynamics, and its conditions.
A shared language and meaning, which makes understanding and good will possible in the first place, and which necessitates a degree of shared experience: of “destiny groups” or “soul groups,” which in the globalized world don’t necessarily have to be identical with nations or peoples.
A willingness, fuelled by love for insight, truth and learning, to slaughter sacred cows and accept the pain that goes along with it, indeed embracing a sort of prolonged metaphysical death as the most powerful means of advancing.
A grip on oneself, ideally combined with a right-hemisphere-type awareness of the all-encompassing “realm beyond the facts” that prevents a descent into madness, schizo conspiratorial thinking or unconscious pain avoidance leading one astray.
Even, I would argue, a gradual opening of a mystical channel that can get us in touch with the divine, because once we leave the world of the presuppositions accepted by our epoch and society, we can easily go mad or fall for the dark side without subtle guidance from the realm hidden from direct vision.
Lacking these conditions, “free speech” just means the exchange of polite ideas compatible with a given epoch’s polite society. While that’s not a bad thing, it doesn’t help us deal with the issue of censorship and limits of free speech that, again, will always be there in one form or another.
Can these conditions for true free speech be fulfilled at all? They do sound rather utopian, to be sure. Perhaps the best we can hope for is pockets of true free speech among groups of souls who share certain experiential features, a certain path. For others, the concept of free speech will always be a thin veneer covering the reality of power games fuelled by the selfish drive to preserve one’s belief structure, and therefore avoiding pain.
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Since I lean a bit more towards fatalism, being German and all, I don’t see this ending well. Our Faustian culture certainly shows no sign of Spengler’s peaceful sunset, while those who leaned into its spirit, whether on the left or the right, have only managed to produce technocratic nightmares. Perhaps it’s true that we can’t directly change our destiny, because we are part of an organic whole, and our new belief structures therefore must grow organically, naturally, teleologically. But maybe we can plant seeds, water them, and look at the sun for a source of guidance, energy, and direction to help the organic process along, and add our own small part to the success of this whole cosmic endeavor. As I have argued elsewhere, the human condition is an unsolvable equation, which means we can only do our part and hope.
The concept of free speech is simply not enough to capture what’s going on here. But I don’t want to advance some anti-free-speech take here just for the sake of being edgy: the means to express ourselves publicly and semi-publicly without fear of immediate persecution is a great gift, and a useful aspect of the liberal tradition. We can use it to shift the narrative goalpost, the semi-conscious and unconscious assumptions our modern world runs on, and to connect with our “destiny communities.” But if we value this opportunity, knowing what we know about the dynamics of core assumptions battling it out in a war-like scenario, it might be best to strategically focus on that connection and the shifting of goalposts, as opposed to running headlong into the enemy lines while screaming “free speech.” Naïveté has never won anything.
Free speech is a great ideal, but ideals are not enough: we also need to understand reality. There is no absolute free speech, never has been, never will be. The question is: do we learn to choose our own boundaries, or do we allow ourselves to be unconsciously limited in our thoughts or unconsciously driven towards a war on a terrain not of our choosing? Both cases limit our freedom, whereas recognizing and working with our society’s core assumptions (to a degree) actually advances our agility and freedom of expression.
The issue of censorship always comes to the forefront when there is a transition towards a new set of background assumptions. It’s not so much a clash of ideas as it is a clash of (often unconscious) “absolute presuppositions.” Having a positive impact in such a situation is an organic art; knee-jerk reactions or absolutist ideological concepts are its natural enemies.
Referenced previous essays:
Whenever I feel that my freedom of expression is being infringed upon, it's usually because my hazy thoughts are unable to get around the tyranny of grammar and syntax.
My poor writing skills oppress me more than other humans.
In counterargument, I invoke the aphorism by François de La Rochefoucauld, "Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue." If human beings find it impossible to embody a virtue with perfect integrity, does it follow that they should stop calling it a virtue? I don't believe so. Why shouldn't our ethical reach exceed our grasp?