Suffering for good of free speech

Idon't want to add to the pile-on over Julie Anne Genter's tantrum in Parliament. But I’m curious why someone who advocates the politics of kindness and evidence-based debate, found herself crossing the floor in a screaming rage, waving her evidence in the face of her opponent.

Like many of our political and cultural elites, she sees herself as an expert. The type of expert who thinks that if they shout more of their evidence at you, it will change your mind. And when their evidence is questioned, they don’t see disagreement – they feel their self-identity as an expert is being rejected. So Genter is angry because that identity is threatened.

Screaming “I’m right and you're wrong” until your opponent sees the error of his ways works well on my husband, but I doubt Genter would change her mind if new evidence emerged that the costs of cycleways in central Wellington outweigh the benefits.

Knowledge is evidence-based, but it doesn’t work by insisting on the correctness of your facts. Like science, it works by posing a hypothesis and having others set out to prove it wrong.

It advances only when others try to knock your idea down. If it survives the assault, then chances are it’s a good idea.

Victoria University’s recent postponement of a panel debate on free speech was a dereliction because it casually dumped this proven method of sorting ideas, to appease students who said the inclusion of “right-wing” free speech advocates could “compromise the safety of marginalised groups on the campus”. The insidious part of the “Be Kind” messages during Covid was the faintly authoritarian pressure not to question, accept expertise, and comply.

And yet, kindness is appealing because civility matters.

American author Jonathan Rauch calls the “liberal sciences”, including free speech, a knowledge-producing social system where truth gets sorted from falsehood.

Rauch talks of a “constitution of knowledge” in his book of the same title. Not as a metaphor, but as a set of house rules. Nobody has the final say. Knowledge constantly evolves. Being hurt by ideas is an unavoidable consequence of doing the hard job of finding knowledge.

To advance what we know, he says, “we must all suffer sometimes”.

“Worse than that, we must inflict suffering on others”, because there will always be losers in this game of sorting.

Creationists who wanted their theory of God-guided evolution to be taught in the science curriculum had their feelings hurt. Their idea failed the rigour required to teach it to our kids. Freedom of speech does not translate into freedom of knowledge.

In Auckland this week, I asked Rauch how the progressive left, once the champions of free speech, have become the “Gluten Free for Palestine” protesters barring Jewish students from entering New York’s Columbia University.

Rauch (who is being hosted here by the Free Speech Union) says some who see themselves as progressive see “hate speech” as a form of violence used in the past to threaten minorities and soak societies with racism, homophobia and misogyny.

The past was certainly soaked in bigotry. But that was not the fault of liberalism. It was a failure to embrace it.

Enlightenment liberalism existed in many cultures, including among those Muslim thinkers who rescued Greek libraries and texts. There is nothing colonial about the pursuit of knowledge through free speech.

The university’s “kindly inquisitors” (another Rauch book), who seek to protect people from offence with censorship, have good intentions, but “inevitably in all places and times, with only rare exceptions, the advocates of freedom of speech are the people who fear the most from censorship. And the people who have the power to censor are the least amenable to freedom of speech.”

In the mid-20th century the power to censor was in the hands of the conservative establishment who targeted suspected Communists in 1950s America.

“In the modern context of cultural and idea-making institutions of journalism and academia, for example, the power to censor is now effectively in the hands of the left.”

It is human not to want to give up that power.

Rauch talks about how, as a gay man, the argument for gay marriage was won by holding the other side’s argument up in plain view, and demonstrating to your opponents that there was something wrong with the picture they’ve created for themselves of the world.

The civil rights movement took the same approach. Both transformed the lives of marginalised groups more than censorship has ever done.

The greatest idea that humans ever had is also the most counterintuitive idea. “That we should not only tolerate speech and thought that is wrong-headed, seditious, offensive, obnoxious, heretical or blasphemous, but that we actually benefit from this as a society.” It’s how we sort good ideas from bad, and live in peaceful disagreement.

Censorship isn’t just refusing to have a debate. It can be hidden when experts like Julie Anne Genter see their authority as beyond question.

We got lazy. Like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill, we must defend free speech again.