I want to begin with two observations/questions. The first comes from reading Peter Drucker. He models communication as a message being sent and then received. Drucker asserts that the active party in any communication is the recipient (listener). It is an interesting perspective as most people probably assume that the active party is the sender (speaker). If you take Drucker's view seriously, it would seem that both the sender and the receiver have rights that must be taken into account. How is that done in practice?
The second observation is about this blog. I make posts at my leisure, when I want to. So on that score I seem to have complete freedom. Yet I have very few readers now and, frankly, I'd like to have more of them. In part, that is why I re-post to Facebook, rather than simply link to a post. I'm guessing that more of my friends will read it that way. But out on the Web, it is much more hit and miss. Ten years ago there were a lot of hits. Nowadays, it is mainly miss. Am I exercising free speech now or not? Does free speech demand having an actual audience, not just the potential for having such an audience?
One can go a long way in trying to address these observations in a coherent manner and I encourage the reader to try doing that in a way that might produce a consensus answer. I am going to answer these here with my own views only, not claiming they are how everyone else thinks about them. And the case in point that I will use to base my response is receiving unsolicited emails from vendors. I get quite a few of these. I feel no obligation to even read them. When I do read them on occasion, mainly I feel no obligation to respond. Once in a while, when the sender is using my current campus address (@illinois.edu) but not the old address (@uiuc.edu) and the sender seems earnest yet is ignorant that I have retired, I will respond by noting that and asking the person to take me off their mailing list. While I strongly believe in collegiality as a rule, I do this mainly not to be a good citizen, but to avoid getting future emails from this person. I don't feel a strong social obligation in this case and indeed it is an uphill battle, since new vendors whom I've never met send email with their own unsolicited spiels all the time. I can't say whether the vendor has better luck with other recipients, but if I am typical of those recipients then the vendor doesn't deserve an audience. To sum up, the vendor does have free speech, but the audience can safely ignore the message, so that when there isn't an audience it doesn't mean that free speech has been denied.
Now we should take the discussion from individuals to groups of like minded people. Whereas an individual receiver can simply ignore the message from a sender, a group of receivers may have sufficient power to block the sender's transmission. In this case, is the group denying the free speech rights of the sender?
I deliberately used an online example above, my blog post, because such avenues are freely available to anyone. They can't be blocked. As an alternative to writing out a post like this, I could record a talking head video on my computer and post to YouTube or some other online video host. If that avenue is always there, does a group blocking free speech in a face to face setting then constitute denial of free speech, or is it merely pushing the speech to another venue? This is not such an easy question to answer. And it is confounded by the following. Speech may be a market activity, meaning the speaker expects to get paid for giving the talk. The speaker then may not want to produce a freely available online alternative, as that might cut into earning speaker fees.
The practice of students on some campuses blocking a speaker from giving a talk has drawn a strong reaction in many circles. For example, consider this piece from the Boston Globe about the episode at Middlebury College, where the speaker Charles Murray was blocked from talking. I've been asking myself, what if the protest had been somewhat milder, a boycott that strongly discouraged attendance at the talk but without any threats of violence to those who did attend or to the speaker. Contrary to what actually happened, suppose Murray did give his talk but the auditorium was largely empty. Would that have produced much the same reaction in the press, or quite a different response? In other words, is it the violent blocking that is at issue or any sort of blocking whatsoever? I really don't know. If a certain type of civil disobedience was deemed acceptable, even if it had the consequence of reducing the size of the audience, my preference would be to embrace that form of protest and shy away from the violent forms. However, I'm far less certain whether that is a matter of preserving free speech rights of the speaker or simply a distaste for violence.
Then, I want to consider a different situation where the receiver/listener is in a somewhat captive situation and thus is unable to ignore the message sent by the sender/speaker. This happens, for example, when both are students in a discussion-based class. As I've written about this example in the past, in a post called Theism - "Pan", "Mono", and "A", I want to try to unpeel the issues some first before discussing possible ways to address them.
During the first two years of writing this blog, I was a campus administrator and indeed the blog was hosted on a campus Web site, though the blog was not linked directly from the Web site of the unit I supervised. I thus felt that while I was representing my own thinking in the blog, rather than agreed upon campus thinking, I had an obligation to respect campus thinking and decision making. This show of respect happened both in the tone of the post - exploratory, not accusatory - and in the way arguments are made, highlighting where "reasonable people might disagree." I mention this because I think some of the free speech issues in the classroom are about tone and style of argument. Speakers feel they can be blunt and uncaring about how listeners will react. Also, if the speaker feels disrespected for the speaker's prior held views, the argument is apt to be made to win the point, rather than in a way to get at the truth.
On the matter of bluntness, one should then ask whether the speaker is well aware of how the listener will react, so is deliberately trying to do harm to the listener, or if the speaker is ignorant of how the listener will react and doesn't expect what is said to cause a negative reaction. On the matter of the speaker feeling disrespected, that will promote anger and anger is a driver for trying to win the point. It is also possible, however, that the speaker is not angry, but merely egotistical. Arguing from the perspective of the speaker, If I know more than you I expect to be right and my job is to show you the error in your ways. So lack of humility may be an alternate explanation to anger. The two factors may mutually support one another, as well.
Some of the arguments I see being made about free speech seem to assume that the speaker can be willfully ignorant and make argument as the speaker sees fit, independent of the sensibilities of the listener. And it matters not here whether this happens on the open Internet or in a captive situation, such as the classroom I described. As you might guess from reading this piece, I believe the captive situation requires ways to contain the speaker some because the listener has rights too, while the open Internet does not, because there the receiver can ignore the message. In my ideal, the best way to contain the speaker would be via a gentle education that aimed to encourage the speaker to seriously consider the listener's perspective. Even with such an ideal, however, there should be a recognition that it would be a long time coming to deliver such education in an effective manner. Thus, it is likely necessary to have some rules/regulations that govern speech in the captive setting. Regulations are never perfect. There can be too many regulations or a given regulation can be too onerous. So this is a balancing act. Purists don't like balancing acts. But those same purists, when considering free speech, likely entirely ignore the rights of the listeners.
I want to close here by noting a couple of other pieces I've written on this general topic, which shows at a minimum that I'm fascinated by it and I don't believe it is well treated in the arguments I read about it. A month ago I wrote a piece about embracing rules that move us from debate to reasoned argument. If speech is viewed as a piece of reasoned argument then more people will embrace speech where there are diverse views expressed. Such rules then need to be seen as playing a dual role, one as constraint, the other as enabler. I think having this duality view is helpful in considering free speech issues. The other piece I wrote less than two weeks ago about speech in the classroom. The instructor regulates student speech in a classroom in a variety of different ways. In a well functioning classroom students get used to the flow and the instructor with a deft touch is appreciated by the students. I believe that such an instructor actually embraces the rules of the previous post, at least implicitly. The classroom is a place where students are meant to learn inquiry methods. Thus, it is my belief that a well functioning classroom, which might take a chunk of the semester to operate well, can tolerate differences of opinion and that contentious speech would better be handled after the class has reached this high level of function than early on, where everyone is a stranger. More generally, by which I mean moving outside of the classroom context, I think an ongoing conversation of people with different perspective has the potential for producing interesting results if they engage in argument, but not debate. The thing is, argument is slower and more time consuming. It is impatience that makes productive speech hard to achieve and why there is so much fracture when it comes to contentious issues.
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