By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
There’s a tension so deep in how we think about free
expression, it should rightly be called a paradox.
On the one hand, regardless of ideology, artists and
writers almost unanimously insist that they do what they do to change minds.
But the same artistes, auteurs, and opiners recoil in horror when anyone
suggests that they might be responsible for inspiring bad deeds.
Hollywood, the music industry, journalism, political
ideologies, even the Confederate flag: Each takes its turn in the dock when
some madman or fool does something terrible.
The arguments against free speech are stacked and waiting
for these moments like weapons in a gladiatorial armory. There’s no
philosophical consistency to when they get picked up and deployed, beyond the
unimpeachable consistency of opportunism.
Hollywood activists blame the toxic rhetoric of
right-wing talk radio or the tea party for this crime, the National Rifle
Association blames Hollywood for that atrocity. Liberals decry the toxic
rhetoric of the Right, conservatives blame the toxic rhetoric of the Left.
When attacked — again heedless of ideology or consistency
— the gladiators instantly trade weapons. The finger-pointers of five minutes
ago suddenly wax righteous in their indignation that mere expression — rather,
their expression — should be blamed. Many of the same liberals who pounded
soapboxes into pulp at the very thought of labeling record albums with
violent-lyrics warnings instantly insisted that Sarah Palin had Representative
Gabby Giffords’s blood on her hands. Many of the conservatives who spewed hot
fire at the suggestion that they had any culpability in an abortion-clinic
bombing gleefully insisted that Senator Bernie Sanders is partially to blame
for Representative Steve Scalise’s fight with death.
And this is where the paradox starts to come into view:
Everyone has a point.
“The blame for violent acts lies with the people who
commit them, and with those who explicitly and seriously call for violence,”
Dan McLaughlin, my National Review
colleague, wrote in the Los Angeles Times
last week. “People who just use overheated political rhetoric, or who happen to
share the gunman’s opinions, should be nowhere on the list.”
As a matter of law, I agree with this entirely. But as a
matter of culture, it’s more complicated.
I have always thought it absurd to claim that expression
cannot lead people to do bad things, precisely because it is so obvious that
expression can lead people to do good things. According to legend, Abraham
Lincoln told Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the
book that started this great war.” Should we mock Lincoln for saying something
ridiculous?
As Irving Kristol once put it, “If you believe that no
one was ever corrupted by a book, you have also to believe that no one was ever
improved by a book. You have to believe, in other words, that art is morally
trivial and that education is morally irrelevant.”
If words don’t matter, then democracy is a joke, because
democracy depends entirely on making arguments — not for killing, but for
voting. Only a fool would argue that words can move people to vote but not to
kill.
Ironically, free speech was born in an attempt to stop
killing. It has its roots in freedom of conscience. Before the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648, the common practice was that the rulers’ religion
determined their subjects’ faith too. Religious dissent was not only heresy but
a kind of treason. After Westphalia, exhaustion with religion-motivated
bloodshed created space for toleration. As the historian C. V. Wedgwood put it,
the West had begun to understand “the essential futility of putting the beliefs
of the mind to the judgment of the sword.”
This didn’t mean that Protestants instantly stopped
hating Catholics or vice versa. Nor did it mean that the more ecumenical hatred
of Jews vanished. What it did mean is that it was no longer acceptable to kill
people simply for what they believed — or said.
But words still mattered. Art still moved people. And the
law is not the full and final measure of morality. Hence the paradox: In a free
society, people have a moral responsibility for what they say, while at the
same time a free society requires legal responsibility only for what they
actually do.
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