Freedom of Speech - Sine Qua Non of Liberty

Sometimes, I feel like a visitor from another planet. Why is it that everyone - not just here on TagWorld, but on every similar site I've visited since I started my research project having to do with the public discourse - obviously (scarily) feels wounded - or insulted (which seems to be even worse, for many) by mere words, even words conveyed by a technological device across thousands of miles?

A name, often a nom de guerre, pen name, or "handle," has become a person - a real opponent in a real, harmful, even lethal, fight? Tone, tenor, even order, merit - evoke - pain, anger, or sadness?

My god - that I (may) disagree means that I have inflicted (real) INJURY? I must fly exactly formation with anyone I don't want to make a furious enemy? Any disagreement whatever with one extreme point of view or the other means that I am a member of the other extreme?

What kind of reasoning is that?

I guess I know, then, why I went to the wilderness. Of course, that wasn't because you could actually injure me the way the people who were shooting at me, or trying to run me down with cars and vans, or sending people to mug me as I walked the streets were; I have never in my life been injured by a spoken word.

Apparently, I lack something possessed by my fellows here in the Land of the Free, and of free speech. My mind, you see - my spirit, are injured only by my own, internal insult - not available for such from without.

But, I confess, that's what I came looking - to TagWorld and elsewhere on the computer - to find out. Once, over a century ago, a man named Joseph, told Congress that he didn't want to fight over words, or god. I've always felt a kinship – perhaps this is why - with Chief Joseph. Chief or the Nez Perce, and I may go back to the woods again. Something is happening, something very evil and insidious, and I frankly don't understand it. It's like watching the approach of a tornado, or a storm at sea. Ominous, malevolent - wanting to destroy. If we really believe that free speech is a right, how do we condemn, even hate, someone for DOING it?

I suppose to really appreciate, to put appropriate value, on something, you have to have planted its seed, cultivated, nurtured, and defended it against things trying to kill it. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness begin with a seed, too. They grow, and come to fruition, the same way. Always planted, cultivated, nurtured, and defended. Destroying them is as easily done as speaking a few words. I don't give a damn if you detest everything I say, or I detest everything YOU say.

In fact, now that I’ve said that, and assuming that I have integrity sufficient to save me from hypocrisy, I couldn't possibly detest your error. I couldn’t hate your error, or the method by which you came to it, because, however wrong and misguided it may be, I know with the certainty of my own experience that your error would have been arrived at in exactly the same manner I arrive at mine –and that each and every time I've tried myself to get a thing right.

If I pass judgment on others, I pass judgment on myself. But there is more here. This nation is something absolutely unique in human history and experience, being a people and its government who are dedicated to the principle that a human being has certain rights simply by virtue of being a human being, and that neither government nor people have anything to do with granting those rights. While I will not bore you with history I know you will not read, I will let it suffice to remind us all here that there was a time when the principle I’ve just enunciated did not exist outside Northern, Saxon, Germany, and that the human race otherwise had no such concept.

First, perhaps, among all the rights identified and guaranteed – NOT granted; I remind you that no one has that authority – is that of being able to speak his mind without fear of retaliation or punishment. Without the right to speak freely, there can be, after all, no such thing as democracy – certainly not where our form of the same is concerned.

As Voltaire once said, "I may detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The French writer, essayist, deist and philosopher was known for unrelenting defense of civil liberties, and his willingness to defend to the death the right to free speech was due his realization that without it, there cannot be the freedoms which only democracy certainly assures.

But with me there’s even more: With John Donne, I know that no man is an island unto himself. Every man is a part of the whole, of the main, and if you don't say it, I'm the less.

It's like my own erroneous thought or effort. Unmade, I must wait for the conclusion, the goal, I really seek. If I haven’t the benefit of another’s errors, then all the errors from which I benefit must be mine. But, for reasons for which I can likewise only grope in the dark, my fellows here and everywhere seem to derive some kind of incomprehensible pleasure from recrimination and calling names - even anger and condemnation of a view opposed to theirs. I'm only trying to understand.

I’m a judoka – judo player – and to the judoman, the opponent is everything. To paraphrase Orson Scott Card, there is no teacher but the opponent. No one but the opponent can teach what the opponent is going to do. Only the opponent shows you where you are weak. Only the opponent tells you where he is strong, and the game shows him what you can do to him and teaches you what you can stop him from doing to you." The better my opposition, the better I will be; and no champion of judo ever was who didn’t have championship level opposition with whom to train and compete. To injure and incapacitate an opponent, or to drive him from the mat by ill manners or affront otherwise, can be disastrous to one’s chances at success in the sport.

The parallel where discourse and debate is concerned is obvious, and effort to drive the opposing viewpoint from the arena or forum is even scarier than what it seems to seek, which is silence except for the noise of one’s own point of view. It’s frightful because of what it implies where all other of our sacred rights are concerned. Every man’s death diminishes me; and death or damage of every man’s rights diminishes MY rights.

More, when any man and his rights go on trial, it is MY rights that are being tried. Lost to the worst villain imaginable, they are lost to me simultaneously – at exactly the same time.

Once a policeman, I was never able to understand the officer of the law who on account of the supposed - or, even, dead certain - guilt of the accused was willing to violate the latter’s Constitutional rights. How could the cop fail to understand that to deprive any accused any of his rights under the Constitution was to steal something of the guarantee represented by our system of law and government? I once remarked that to lie under oath was like shooting into a crowd of the innocent in order to kill the guilty.

If I will let another man’s rights be damaged or stolen, mine will certainly be lost. If I shout down, or by intimidation silence, the views of others, I will most assuredly have the same done to me. There is, therefore, a very frightening thing loose in this country. It is typified, even personified, by people like Ann Coulter and Rosie O’Donnell. It is intolerance. It is intolerance so virile, so ubiquitous that in a nation whose national religion is that of economics, whose greatest virtue is avarice, that it has spawned a new kind of advertising and sales pitch – that directed toward hate.

Hate, as I said in an earlier essay here, sells. It sells even better than lurid sex. Even that wouldn’t be so terrifying, were it not for what it must inevitably mean. It means the death of the key ingredient of liberty, that of thought. The United States has become a nation where just two opposing political viewpoints scream thoughtlessly at one another. Seen as “flip-flopping” or “waffling,” no reflection or deliberation, no consideration or moderation, is to be tolerated. The United States, the nation founded on those very principles, has now become the nation that detests them, and despises thought.

The purpose of public discourse – and freedom of speech – is that of dialectic; the same as that of forensics and the courtroom. To know the truth. Imagine a courtroom in which attorneys and witnesses could be shouted down, or intimidated by insulting or preponderant talk. We can, in fact, see the result on any given television debate between supposed pundits and scholars, where everyone talks at once, each of the principals trying to shout down the opposing view, and where, finally, the viewer has learned utterly nothing.

My research of the public discourse is all but finished, and I will report some results – those of more than four years analysis - here. I have, by the way, been meticulous in all aspects of statistical analysis, such that I am absolutely certain of my data. Where vicious and vituperative speech and terminology are the result of disagreement, persons who identify themselves as liberal in political viewpoint are responsible sixty-two percent of the time (obviously, Ann Coulter is even more exceptional than one might otherwise imagine). There is in that a parallel and corollary that I find fascinating, the fact that in a nation professing to prize freedom of speech, yet willing to do almost anything conceivable to prevent it, a group of persons who call themselves “liberal” demonstrate loudly and publicly their absolute intolerance of opposing viewpoints.

As second President of the United States John Adams once observed, “The proposition that the people are the best keepers of their own liberties is not true. They are the worst conceivable. They are no keepers at all. They can neither, judge, act, think, or will as a political body.” I think I know what he spoke of. In the United States, invariably, shouted down from the religiously and ideologically rigid and dogmatic political extremes, the loneliest man in the room is the thoughtful political moderate. That, more than anything else evident and happening today, may signal the end of our way of life.

Without freedom of speech, the freedom of thought is pointless for a nation. It behooves us, then to nurture, rather than do everything we can to kill it.