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What It Takes to Truly Have Diversity (Cancel Culture Series #3)


In post #1 of this series I shared about Charles Murray as an extreme example of cancel culture in action, and in post #2 I looked at the trend of increasing cancellation attempts over the past 10 years. But that brings us to the question: why does it matter? What do we lose when we let cancel culture have its way?


The short answer to that is free speech.


Our Diverse Society


But before diving into why free speech is important, it's first helpful to point out that the diversity we experience in modern western democratic countries like Canada or the US is (in the big picture of human history) quite a new experiment. Most people in most places throughout the world for thousands of years until the 1700s or so would have lived around people who were similar to them. Most people would have lived in a rural area or small town, worked in a similar profession (e.g. farming), and had the same religion, skin colour, customs, social norms, and so on. Of course that's a simplification and there were exceptions. And of course that does not mean everyone always got along—far from it! But it is to say that the radical diversity of types of people that we see nowadays is far higher in degree and prevalence than it had ever been before. And that's not to mention the internet and social media, which further enable radically diverse people to interact on a level unimaginable in previous generations.


So amid this relatively new diversity, how do we as a society manage to not only get along but also make progress? One key piece is freedom of speech.

  • My basic layman's understanding of the freedom of speech is essentially our right to voice our thoughts and opinions without fear of punishment.

  • The opposite of free speech is censorship: when the government (or other authorities and people in power) sets limits on what people can say and what ideas and opinions can be shared.


Reasons to Value Free Speech


On first glance it is easy to affirm the value of free speech. Of course we don't want people to live in fear! Of course we value freedom! But, as the previous two blog posts have shown, we sometimes like the abstract idea of free speech more than actually putting it into practice. And that's because free speech is only truly valuable when you extend it to those you disagree with. We all want free speech for people who share our opinions! But when it comes to people with other political or moral perspectives—especially people who hold views that we find offensive or harmful—it's much more tempting to think they need to be silenced.


So here are five of the most convincing reasons to defend free speech (and oppose censorship) that I've come across in my research:

  1. Free speech advances ideas and society. We all thought that the sun revolved around the earth until Galileo challenged that popular belief. Much of America thought that black people did not deserve equal treatment to white people until Martin Luther King and the civil rights activists challenged that popular belief. These two examples show that certain ideas that initially seem "fringe", minority, radical, or even harmful to society later turn out to be true or helpful. If we silence every voice that doesn't fall in line with today's popular opinion, we are essentially implying that we have achieved a state of perfect ideas and we have nothing left to learn or improve. Free speech is related to an attitude of humility that admits we might (still) have certain erroneous beliefs that need to be challenged.

  2. Free speech refines our beliefs. This second point is similar to the first, but it goes a step further and says that even erroneous ideas can play a helpful role in society. Even if it is basically correct, our understanding of a certain topic can still be pruned and fortified by being challenged by competing perspectives. This is related to the biblical concept of "iron sharpening iron". When our perspective gets challenged it forces us to reevaluate our reasons for holding our perspective, become aware of any weak areas, and come up with stronger and more convincing reasons for holding it. Beliefs that are widely held and never questioned are at risk of becoming weak, because people will forget the reasons for believing them in the first place and may be unable to defend them when they eventually do get challenged.

  3. There are no neutral and selfless censors. For the sake of argument, let's say we decided to forsake free speech and embrace censorship, giving power to the government and other authorities to silence harmful, offensive, and incorrect ideas. The question then becomes: who decides what speech is harmful, offensive, or incorrect? Who would we want to elect to our hypothetical "censorship committee"? The people with the most money, power, strength, or cultural influence? The people who represent majority groups and therefore get the most votes? The reality is that the only people we want censoring speech are the people who agree with all of our opinions. Nobody wants their own perspectives silenced—only the perspectives we disagree with! At best anyone who was given authority to censor speech would let their biases creep into their decisions, and at worst they would use their censoring authority selfishly to maintain their own power and silence anyone who opposed them.

  4. Free speech lessens the likelihood of violence. In a censorship society, as censored individuals become increasingly passionate and concerned about their cause, and the more they feel silenced by authorities, the more inclined they may be to express their feelings through violence. If they feel (whether rightly or wrongly) that their "backs are against the wall" and they are not being given a voice, they may feel they need to pursue their cause by force.

  5. Censorship drives radicalization. Related to the previous point is the concern that an unwillingness to let individuals share their fringe opinions in their normal social circles may simply drive them to seek out others with the same fringe opinions, eventually creating insulated social bubbles that become more and more deeply radicalized. One example of this happening is that growth in "Gab" users (a far-right alternative to Twitter that is a breeding ground for "extremist and conspiratorial content") has been shown to correlate with censorship activity on Twitter. In other words, "silencing" people on Twitter just pushes them to more radical social media sites.

  6. Free speech is the lesser of two evils. Even ardent defenders of free speech admit that living in a society that values free speech can be difficult. It means tolerating people sharing perspectives that we disagree with and sometimes find offensive or abhorrent. But despite those real and serious drawbacks, the drawbacks to censorship are worse. One way to compare the pros and cons of each is to look at countries on either extreme. On the one extreme is the US, a country that has the least limits on free speech, which without a doubt must be difficult at times when it means putting up with bigoted people sharing their ideas and not getting punished for it. But on the opposite extreme are countries like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, where people are regularly imprisoned (or worse) for their religion, criticizing the government, and the groups they belong to, and where the information allowed in and out of the country is closely monitored and restricted by the government. Cancel culture doesn't lead to utopia; it leads to authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and dictatorships.


Footnote

These points are drawn mostly from:

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