There have been many great defenses of freedom of speech over the years. Among my favorites is this speech by Christopher Hitchens, which I recommend everyone watch immediately even if you’ve already heard it. Once you’re done with that, though, allow me to offer something a little more focused. Hitchens, like many defenders of freedom of speech, hits some important points but doesn’t dig quite deep enough for my liking. This piece is my attempt to defend the foundational need for freedom of speech.
What is freedom of speech?
Before we proceed, we should probably define what we are talking about. Freedom of speech is a series of norms wherein people are given genuine liberty to express their actual thoughts to others. These norms can be broadly split into two categories.
Cultural Freedom of Speech
Cultural freedom of speech refers to norms, traditions, and attitudes within a culture that support freedom of speech. A culture of freedom of speech is why you would think it absurd to kick someone out of your house for disagreeing with you on whether food stamps are a good policy or not, or to fire them for voicing support for a political candidate you dislike.
It’s the idea that we should tolerate some of the inevitable personal discomfort that comes from granting people autonomy to express themselves with the knowledge that their standing in life won’t change simply for disagreeing with someone. It is not an infinite tolerance, and to be sure, determining where to draw the line is one of the major cultural problems of our time.
A fundamental assumption of cultural freedom of speech is that there is genuine value in living cooperatively with people that hold different values and ideas. This doesn’t mean you have to like their values or ideas; only that you don’t see differences of opinions of this sort as disqualifying someone from participating in society at large, and within reasonable bounds, you don’t see them as disqualifying someone from being someone you love, care about, and benefit from having in your life.
Legal Freedom of Speech
The second category is the legal implementation of freedom of speech. Cultural freedom of speech only deals in cultural norms and does not deal in the question of coercion. Legal freedom of speech does.
The most famous example of legal freedom of speech is the 1st amendment of the US Constitution. This amendment means that the US government cannot use the force of law to prevent certain points of view from being expressed. It’s the reason a politician cannot pass a law criminalizing speech against him or his policies. It’s the reason you can’t go to jail for using the N word, no matter how rude it was to do or what it communicates about your values or beliefs. It’s the reason that any law criminalizing the burning of an American flag is null and void.
Why Freedom of Speech is Foundationally Important?
Human beings are fundamentally distinct from other animals. This seems to be a case of “quantity has a quality of its own”, as our nervous systems do not appear to be extremely different from that of a chimpanzee, and yet the gulf between humans and chimps when it comes to how they see and interact with the world is vaster than the gulf between a chimp and a lizard.
Human beings primarily engage with the world through reasoning. Reasoning is the process of abstracting concrete experiences into broad categories and algorithmic structures that enable you to make inferences not grounded in direct experience. It’s how someone can figure out what a good bridge is and how to build it before creating a bridge.
Human beings are also social animals. By nature, we live with other people and have deep emotional experiences grounded entirely in our relationship to others. It’s wired into us to interact with other people. And for good reason; the collective intelligence of several humans sharing information and learning in the areas of their respective natural inclination and strength is not merely the sum of their individual intelligences but is orders of magnitude more powerful. It’s the reason iPhones and skyscrapers exist.
These two facts, reasoning being our primary means of interacting with the world and our social nature, are the reason freedom of speech is so important. The information sharing required in order for our collective intelligence to function demands respect for freedom of speech.
Collective reasoning is the most powerful thing human beings have. The scientific method is its crowning jewel; in the empirical realm, it has systemized information creation and sharing so efficiently that the last 300 years make the previous 10,000 look like almost nothing in terms of human advancement.
Closely behind the scientific method, though, is liberalism. While the scientific method normatively systematized the creation of new, useful empirical information, liberalism systematized it politically, providing the necessary legal foundation and institutions for maximizing human cooperation by restricting coercive activity, both from the government and the polity, that would otherwise inhibit it.
This is why freedom of speech, both culturally and legally, is not just one of many important values, but the most important political value. Every other political debate in a civilized society can’t even happen without it. Human cooperation as such depends on freedom of speech to function.
If you value living in the kind of world where humans achieve great things, problems get solved, and quality of life goes up for everyone over time, there can be no issue on which you are more steadfast than this one. A future without freedom of speech is a future in which the gulf between a human life and an animal life shrinks as our collective intelligence atrophies, problems are primarily solved with violence, and disease and decay are the norm. It is literally that important.