Great Antidote Extras: Nico Perrino on Individual Rights and Free Expression

We see free expression as central to individual autonomy, innovation, creativity, artistic expression, peace, democracy, you name it…FIRE does not throat clear or genuflect before defending free speech...
Throughout human history we have solved disputes in mostly one way: through actual violence. If we didn’t like what you had to say we burned you at the stake, we threw you in prison, we burned your books, we tortured you, we forced you to drink the hemlock. One of the innovations of modern society that I think is most valuable is the use of words to solve our disputes. Sigmund Freud once said, "civilization was founded the day man cast a word instead of a stone."

The first amendment and the constitution are imbued with meaning by those of us who seek to live up to and enshrine those ideals in how we go about our lives, and if we don’t those protections for our rights become nothing more than a parchment barrier that can be thrown away by any authoritarian impulse that runs through society. So, it’s important that we live out the values that are enshrined in our law but that’s easier said than done.

I felt like my generation and some of the younger generations have forgotten the reason why we have freedom of expression in the first place and what it’s accomplished for our generations and past generations…over the years it feels like the understanding of the centrality of freedom of expression has been lost…after some of these movements for social justice have found success…younger generations are seeing it as a tool of the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron…but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

They had no power, all they had was their voices, the great civil rights activist John Lewis who passed away in recent years once said, “without freedom of speech the civil rights movement would’ve been a bird without wings”, and Martin Luther King Jr. in his last speech talked about how local governments were restricting the ability of civil rights activists to march in these towns through their permitting processes…freedom of speech protects those who do not have political power to agitate…even if you are a lonely voice out there in a sea of people who disagree with you the first amendment protects your ability to speak out.

How do you expect young people to know any of this history if no one tells them about it.

People suffer from the censors’ curse. When they get into power, censorship is often viewed as a convenient tool to enact the change they want to enact. Wherever the locus of control is within these institutions, that’s where you’re going to find censorship. So, on college and university campuses where the left is predominately in control, most of the censorship is going to come from the left…but you spoke about efforts in state legislatures, particularly republican ones where they hold the institutions of power and they also see censorship as a convenient tool to go after ideas that they don’t like. I talk about how we live in the age of the politics of expediency where we seek out expedient tools to correct perceived problems…forgetting that the tools that we use or the principles that we exercise can be used by our ideological enemies were they to gain power…for years, because the left held power in colleges and universities, and in the media, there was a marriage of convenience between free speech and the right wing, but now conservatives are gaining power and they’re seeing censorship as an expedient weapon to go after speech they don’t like.

Ira Glasser and his generation of civil libertarians decided that they were going to advocate for freedom of speech up to and including defending the rights of neo-nazis to march in a town of Holocaust survivors.

When Alan Charles Kors, the co-founder of FIRE, was a student at Princeton, he had a professor who was Marxist…All the students wrote a paper that tipped their hats towards what they thought the professor wanted to hear…as he’s returning the papers to the students, the professor says, ‘you have profoundly shamed me. You all wrote what you thought I wanted to hear. So, I’m going to assign you the book that I most disagree with in the twentieth century, and I want you to repeat its arguments in your own words so I understand that you understand arguments on the other side…’ This means that we need to introduce students to perspectives from across the political and ideological divides so that students aren’t expecting to hear only one point of view…we need students to have strong convictions that are loosely held.

There are benefits to democracy, science, innovation…but there’s also a benefit to individual liberty, autonomy, agency…I say no to the argument that rights should only be protected insofar as they have a benefit for the larger society. I should be able to be free to be who I am and speak my mind as long as I’m not doing harm to other people…I should be able to exist in this world and bear witness to how I see it regardless of whether someone else sees benefits in what I have to say…there’s value and the right in people’s ability to tell their own stories.

If you say words themselves are violence then logic dictates that you can use actual physical violence to respond to words. Once you make that argument then this whole civilization thing that Freud was referencing goes out the door…you throw out the distinction between words and physical violence and you lose a free society.

There is a sense too that one is being educated when knowledge is being pursued for “its own sake” and not for instrumental reasons of skill development, career advancement, or information processing.

1. Is cancel culture truly a chilling effect on free speech or does it simply hold people accountable for offensive or morally reprehensible views? How slippery is the slope of cancel culture towards legally enforced speech restrictions such as those found in Canada or the United Kingdom?
   
   
2. Would a society of independent self-censorship be a culture of free speech? Is this scenario more preferable than a society of pressured censorship? How important is non-expression as a form or free speech relative to active expression? Is compelled speech a larger threat to freedom of expression than censorship of speech?
   
   
3. Although some academic papers question the notion of Americans increasingly tolerating political violence, incidents of threats, harassment, and attacks against public officials have grown significantly. Are anti-speech attitudes to blame for an increase in political violence? If so, what is the future of freedom of exchange in an environment of violent political extremism?
   
   
4. What are the ingredients of an anti-speech society? What is the level of overlap between cultures that are anti-speech and the legal restriction of other individual rights? Where does the United States fail in protecting speech and where does the nation excel?
   
   
5. Individuals on the left and the right view debate of difficult subjects as potentially harmful due to platforming and spreading dangerous ideas but the ideas they fear are very different. How can a culture of free expression be created and preserved while also minimizing the spread of harmful ideas? Can a prioritization of discouraging harmful ideas over encouraging free exchange lead to a censorship-dominated future?