Dear Friends,
It seems to me, for free speech to function everyone must allow it, if one intolerant faction doesn’t, that intolerant faction’s free speech will be allowed while everyone else free speech will be smothered. Of course the answer is when the vast majority reject any faction out of hand that rejects free speech, but that is much easier to accomplish as a thought experiment, than in real life. It is free speech however that gave and continues to give, the Enlightenment it’s reach and power. Return to a pre Enlightenment philosophy and we return to horse and buggies, the Rights of Kings and human slavery. A true educator would keep this truth above all in the minds of their students, “Argument should always be decided upon the merits of the argument rather than the authority of the speaker, and the best means to do this is free speech.”
Intolerant factions are and will always be the greatest threat to freedom. An intolerant faction is any group of people, no matter how small, that will not tolerate the free speech of those they disagree with. Usually it is not because they consider their peers so stupid as to fall for a fallacious argument, but because they are peddling a fallacious argument themselves, one that can be easily discredited by a reasoned argument. The intolerant faction is made up of people who are perpetuating a lie, know they are perpetuating a lie, and so use violence to silence anyone who would call it a lie. Yet it is tolerance of their violence that gives them so much power.
The best answer to an intolerant faction is not to tolerate their intolerance. When a group shuts down a speaker at a college campus, the faculty have an obligation to blare that speaker’s words throughout the campus, so everyone must then hear it, to stop shutting down free speech by incentives. Lead by example and allow others to speak then demand that same right for yourself as you gave them. Every time you or I bow to the violence of an intolerant faction, we empower that faction to smother more free speech… until only their intolerant ignorant version of truth can be heard, all other voices are silenced.
The Enlightenment was a watershed moment in the philosophy of Mankind. It allowed humanity to ascend above the narrow mindedness that always accompanies authority. Whenever someone becomes an authority on any subject they have an incentive not to change the paradigm. If it does, someone else becomes the authority, and that is unacceptable to an authority. For this reason humanity’s advancement in every field is hindered by the very people in authority. Always has been and always will be. The thinkers that rejected bowing to authority and embraced, truth by reason, were geniuses. They lifted the lot of Man from perpetual toil to the comforts we have today. All of it rests on their shoulders, but they couldn’t have done it under any other religions than Christianity and Judaism.
It is free speech that empowers the Enlightenment. Without the ability to make a point, there can be no reasoned argument. If any voice is silenced then all voices cannot be heard, that should be common sense, but common sense is as dead as a door nail… killed by an intolerant faction. When someone claims there can be no argument, the authorities have spoken, they are trying to return to a pre Enlightenment philosophy. They are saying the only truth is what they say is truth and no other. Which is the very definition of pre Enlightenment thinking.
Without the advances of the Enlightenment, humanity will revert to our natural state, the same state our ancestors existed in, from times before ancient Greece. All the new scientific advances, technological marvels and comforts we take for granted, are founded on the pragmatic enlightened mindset. Take away that mindset, smash the foundation if you will, and the structure comes crashing down, in this case our technological civilization. It would be like the movie Idiocracy, people would have the machines but when those machines broke down they would not be able to fix them, or build new more advanced ones. Eventually, they would all break down and horses would become the normal mode of transportation again, as they were for thousands of years, slaves would be needed to pick the cotton and gin it as well, tyranny would rule the land again without recourse… and the lot of Mankind would be set back centuries.
The answer is education, our children must be inculcated with the knowledge that there is truth, and the way to truth is by reasoned argument based on empirical evidence, not and never, by some snake oil salesman peddling some magical remedy that heals everything. They must understand that authority has something to say, but cannot ever be taken as the final say, reasoned argument must always and everywhere take place, else we become stilted and cease growing, because while authority has valuable knowledge, they are bound to the current paradigm… and growth always leads to paradigm shift. We may never get to the perfect truth of human existence, but as long as we sharpen our understanding of it through the honing of it with reasoned argument, based on empirical evidence with all voices getting a chance to be heard, we can get pretty close.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
