As a general rule, democracies are in danger when part of a country’s populace grows uncompromisingly intolerant to certain ideas and the behavior that such ideas inspire among their believers. Judged by that rule, America is currently at risk of going down this slippery road. Closing in on free thought and speech, illiberal elements on the right and left are trying to shield their respective constituents from critiques of their ideas and actions. They do this by retreating to their respective silos.
This arrangement is hardly stable and durable. As the common space for the exchange of ideas shrinks, intolerance grows, and one side will eventually attempt to silence the other by undemocratic means. For some time now, the common space in this country has been retreating and the competing silos of ideas have hardened.
For a country born with a constitution that placed the course of the country in the hands of its people and gave people the protection to influence this course through the free expression of thought, it is ironic and tragic we are at this point. But it is also a mistake to believe that this fight for free thought is new. To recall the battles for free thought in America, I returned to the book FREETHINKERS by Susan Jacoby.
Since the days of the revolution, the ground for free thought has not been necessarily welcoming. And yet courageous freethinkers rose to take on the banner of unpopular but worthy causes. These were men and women like Thomas Paine (the defender of reason), Robert Green Ingersoll (the Great Agnostic), the suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton, the liberal poet Walt Whitman, the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglas, and Clarence Darrow (the lawyer for the defense in the Scopes (monkey) trial. These freethinkers defended the separation of church and state, spoke against slavery and for voting rights for women, and argued the case of science in society. The intellectual battles of today still echo those causes though in their modern versions.
We still try to reach the right balance of power between religious and secular rights, as the changing numbers of conservative and liberal justices on the Supreme Court keep making the wall of separation lower or higher; unquestionably lower these days. Amendments to the constitution may have abolished slavery and given equal rights to Black Americans but the legacy of slaveholding still casts a shadow and taints the relationship between Americans of different skin color. Women have earned the right to vote but they are still behind men in wages and career opportunities and are still exposed to intrusions to personal matters, especially those concerning reproductive decisions.
Jacoby reminds us that the illiberal streak in America culture and society has waxed and waned as the country moved from the euphoria of independence to its confrontation with the scourge of slavery, the influx of immigrants, the rise of science, the civil emancipation of women, and the spread of socialism and communism. During those periods of warring ideas, fear and intolerance emanated from religious quarters, nationalist circles, and moral puritans. The results were bans of books and movies, laws against obscenity and blasphemy, and equating atheists, agnostics, socialists and communists with lack of morals or patriotism. If the period around the turn of 20th century was (as Jacoby calls it) the Golden Age of free thought, the McCarthy period of the 1950s was the nadir of free thought in America.
Today’s battles are about reproductive rights, racial justice, sexual and gender orientation, the separation of church and state, immigrants, and social fairness in general. One would think that all these issues ought to invite reasoned and informed conversations. On the contrary, they have led to polarized positions, often defended by illiberal means.
On the left, a visceral disdain of white supremacy, antisemitism, anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ views has served as the “justification” for the rejection and expulsion of speech, sympathetic to these views, from university campuses. Beyond that, student bodies have demanded the establishment of “safe” spaces (call them echo chambers) for the socialization of like-minded students, and for “trigger” warnings concerning any coursework material that may be deemed harmful to one’s worldview or self-identification.
Fortunately, after a period of ambivalence and inaction, university officials have started to stand up and put an end to these illiberal methods of quashing free speech and the unencumbered exchange of ideas on the natural venues of pluralism and truth seeking. It is more common than not that the birth and death of free thought and open societies start and end in the hallow grounds of institutions of learning. From the closing of Plato’s Academy to the closing of the Central European University in Orban’s Hungary, authoritarians have known this all too well.
On the right, the attack on free thought has taken, however, a turn towards methods that are even more illiberal and pernicious. With Florida being the epicenter, Republican-controlled states have legislated (or are in the process of doing so) a slew of laws that aim at silencing voices and forms of expression that disagree with conservative notions of a righteous society or an acceptable national narrative. Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law prohibits schools to discuss sexual and gender orientation topics all the way to the 12th grade. Under the guise of shielding students from divisive ideas and giving parents control over the education of their children, the law, in essence, allows minorities of parents (even a single parent) to impose on the rest of the community their standards on the content of education.
The same state’s WOKE (Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act outlaws the teaching of theories arguing for the presence of racism, sexism, and oppression in societies – in reality, a strawman since hardly such theories are taught in public schools. In an egregious encroachment of academic freedom this same law also places restrictions on what can be taught in social sciences in Florida’s state universities. Thankfully, this section is currently blocked by the courts.
The dissonance between ideology and practice is particularly acute in the case of conservative states. How can one profess the efficiency of markets in sorting out preferences for material goods but deny the same efficiency to the marketplace of ideas? And how can one oppose the encroachment of individual liberties by the state but engineer the intrusion of the state in the free exchange of ideas.
There is a big difference between private citizens (like students) fighting for space in the agora of ideas or parents competing for different educational materials in their schools and the state using its authority to impose its ideological partiality to what ideas can be debated and disseminated. This is how free thought dies in theocratic or authoritarian states.
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