The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I have been slowly reading through the pieces David Brooks recommends in his latest Sidney Awards piece. He begins with this interview, How To Tell If You're Being Canceled. To motivate that selection, Brooks precedes it with a discussion of the experience of James Flynn. He wrote a book that defended free speech. The book was pulled by his publisher. I am going to take on these pieces in my post.
As a basis for my critique, I'll make reference to a post from a few years ago, The Demagoguery of the Reasonable Conservative Commentator, which does a rather thorough deconstruction of a column by Bret Stephens. In that post, I refer to Stephens' column as a hatchet job and that is mainly from what he omits in his argument that I thought essential to include. I often have this feeling of reading a hatchet job when I do read pieces by Conservative authors (which I do with less frequency as of late). So, here I will put in the missing pieces.
First, let me consider self-publishing such as in this blog post. It is an option available to anyone with an Internet connection. The host will have some terms of service that must be abided by, but otherwise, the author can say whatever he wants - complete freedom. This freedom doesn't imply there will be any readers. But the message can certainly get out. For somebody like me who has been at it for some time, perhaps the quality of past posts provides some indicator of the quality of the current post. But maybe not. The term blather, as I'm using it in my title, is meant to be writing or speech that has no mechanism of quality assurance to accompany it. Freedom of blather is a condition of the world we live in. (For those in a university setting where there are codes of conduct, which may even govern blather on platforms not associated with the university, one can post under an alias and bypass the regulation that way.)
Is blather, as I've described it in the previous paragraph, sufficient when considering speech? If it is, then all of this is much ado about nothing. Stop complaining. Freedom of speech is alive and well.
Second, let us consider the examples that were presented in these pieces. The examples feature some organization with a strong reputation itself, the New York Times is one, Middlebury College is another, giving its imprimatur to a piece of writing by publishing it or likewise giving its imprimatur by inviting the person to give a campus lecture. The imprimatur is an implicit statement about quality assurance. In each case that implicit statement is made to the organization's constituency. For the New York Times, that is readers. For Middlebury College, that is students, faculty and staff, and alumni.
In both cases, it seems that there is an obligation by the organization to provide the constituency with well argued ideas that the constituency would tend to resist. If most readers of the New York Times are Liberal, these would be pieces written by Conservative authors and likewise for students at Middlebury. In doing this, the role is something akin to a parent making their kids eat their vegetables at dinner. It's good for them, even if they don't like the taste. Does paternalism of this sort survive, even when the constituency is itself comprised of adults? (I will leave the question of whether college students are children or adults unanswered here.) The quote that I began this piece with provides a basis for arguing that the type of adults we aspire for in these constituencies should be able to handle the variety without undo difficulty.
In the economics analysis of quality assurance of this sort, as described in Klein and Leffler's article, The Role of Market Forces in Assuring Contractual Performance, it is the repeat purchases of customers that provides incentive for a firm to produce high quality of an experience good (a good where the customer can't tell the quality at the time of purchase) even when there is a one-shot gain for the firm from producing low quality, because doing that is cheaper. In that event we say the firm "cashes in" on its reputation. Then the customers will "punish" the firm by shopping elsewhere in the future. Likewise, what Jonathan Rauch refers to as the Cancel Culture, can be thought of as institutions not honoring their trust relationship with their constituencies and then being punished for that.
So, what I find missing in the Rauch interview, and I suspect it is missing as well in Flynn's book, it is certainly missing in the Webpage that Brooks linked to, is a look at what the implicit promise is between such a high profile organization and its constituency and what would constitute a breach of this promise. Not everyone has an Op-Ed in the New York Times and not everyone gets to give a public lecture at Middlebury. So there surely are criteria for ruling people out as speakers or ruling their written work out for publication. Were those criteria applied well in the cases cited or not? Rauch bypasses this entirely:
The notion here is that emotional injury is a kind of harm like physical injury, and because it's a kind of harm it's a rights violation. The problem is this is a completely subjective standard, and it makes any form of criticism potentially subject to censorship and cancellation and lumps science into a human rights violation.
Having dismissed emotional injury, it appears the organizations are never in a position to violate the trust. The blame can then fall only on those doing the canceling. In my view, that is a poor analysis of the situation.
Let me make specific comments about the cases cited. Students at Middlebury could very well learn about the ideas of Charles Murray by reading The Bell Curve or by watching one of the many videos of him on YouTube. It is a fatuous argument to say he has to be invited to campus for students to hear that view. In the case of the New York Times publishing the Op-Ed by Tom Cotton, a quite different argument can be made for not doing it, which does not deal with emotional injury. The Times, like it or not, is part of the political landscape. When a well known Conservative political figure publishes a piece in the Times, it lends legitimacy to the argument being made. We are living in a wackadoodle world now where Trump does crazy things that should be strongly resisted. Publishing Cotton's piece was a mild form of embrace of the Trump view. I would hope that in the future we can return to where this sort of consideration is not relevant. But it would be naive to think it is not relevant now.
Third, the interview with Rauch makes no mention of sexual harassment nor of misogynistic speech. I can't tell whether the interviewer, Nick Gillespie, deliberately steered the discussion away from that example or not. Had it been included, there would be a clearer linkage between the emotional harm and the physical harm. There is no doubt #MeToo is a form of the Cancel Culture. But if you interviewed women, many would say that it has had a material impact on reducing sexual harassment. Including this, as example, would weaken Rauch's argument. It's lack of inclusion is bothersome, for that reason.
Let me close by noting that over the years I've written a handful of posts that focus on freedom of speech. In case the current post stimulates thinking in the reader, its status as blather notwithstanding, the reader might find some of these others interesting as well.
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