Free speech will not save us

Across the culture wars of the Trump era, from the controversies over diversity and dissent in academia and Silicon Valley to the president’s personal war against protesting pro football players, there is a principled argument that the best cure for polarization everywhere is a stronger respect for freedom of speech.

This argument asks conservatives to recognize that their defense of intellectual diversity on campus is hollow unless they also defend the rights of black athletes to publicly protest. It asks left-wingers to recognize that shouting down right-wing speakers or getting Google engineers fired for “wrongthink” involves the same tactics they deplore when they’re used against progressives. It asks everyone to commit not just to the letter of the First Amendment but to a broader culture of free speech.

I admire the principle of this position, and to some extent I share it: There is no doubt that tolerance and magnanimity are virtues that our society’s warring factions need to cultivate. But it’s also important to recognize that these virtues depend on deeper forms of wisdom and consensus, and they can’t always sustain themselves in cultures and institutions that are simply going bad. Like everything associated with “classical liberalism” — to borrow a label claimed by some of the shouted-down academic dissidents — the idea of free speech is part of a superstructure that can easily be pulled apart from below by contending factions, or crumble when its cultural foundation disappears.

Consider the NFL protests first. Yes, it would be good if there were a stronger commitment to free speech from team owners, and if they weren’t so willing to collude against their players’ activism.

But the problems run much deeper. The owners aren’t interested in standing up for their employees’ right to protest because their bottom line is threatened by Americans exercising their rights and turning off their televisions or ditching season tickets.

The reasons for that counterprotest include an admirable patriotism and an understandable weariness with the politicization of sports and entertainment. But they also include a typical conservative cluelessness about black grievances, a performative and commercialized Americanism that parodies healthy civic life, and the toxic identity politics that President Donald Trump is constantly encouraging. And then, of course, the NFL is particularly vulnerable to Trump’s demagoguery because its business model depends on gladiatorial combat whose medical risks it has been desperate to hush up.

So the NFL owners have a multilayered problem, cultur- al and financial and political and medical, to which a simple why-don’t-they-respect-freespeech solution seems woefully insufficient. Everything about the intersection of sports and race relations and the Trump presidency is simply toxic, and expecting free speech to flourish where those rivers meet is like suggesting that a Superfund site cleanup begin by planting daffodils in the most polluted stretch.

There’s a similar problem with debates about free speech on liberal college campuses. Yes, it’s obviously bad when speakers are denied a platform, threatened and shouted down. But if every protester suddenly fell silent, the atmosphere in elite academia would still be kind of awful — and not only from a conservative perspective.

Meritocracy, materialism and smartphones would still induce mental breakdowns among bright young climbers. The humanities would still be in existential crisis and possibly terminal decline. A “hedge fund with a library attached” model of administration would still prevail. An incoherent mix of ambitious scientism and post-protestant moralism and simple greed would still be the ruling spirit.

Much of recent left-wing campus activism has to be understood in this depressing context — as a response to a pre-existing crisis, an attempt to infuse morality and purpose into institutions that employ many brilliant minds but mostly promote incurious ambition and secular conformity.

Which suggests that the dissident, “dark web” intellectuals who have gained a following by warring with those activists ultimately need (as some of them seem to intuit) a competing moral and metaphysical vision of their own, not just the procedural freedom to say some stuff that is politically incorrect.

A cycle of conservative speakers triggering left-wing activists may vindicate the First Amendment, but it won’t help the university escape its current incoherence and despondency. A classical liberalism that only wants to defend its own right to argue will end up talking only to itself. If you want a healthy culture of debate, it’s not enough to complain that Marxists and postmodernists are out to silence you; you need your own idea of what education and human life itself are for.

Yes, this makes the problem sound insanely big; the advantage of free speech as common ground is that you don’t have to solve the “what’s wrong with academia” problem or the equally daunting “what’s wrong with big-time sports and race relations.”

But sometimes the problems are bad enough that the procedural approach isn’t a solution. And with due respect to the First Amendment, I think this is one of those times.