Free Speech and / or Intelligent Criticism

© Edward Moore 2015

In a letter to his friend, Arnold Ruge, the young Karl Marx made a call for "a merciless criticism of everything existing, merciless in two senses: this criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions and must not shrink from a collision with the established powers." These words were shocking and subversive in 1843; they are not so now. Rather, today, criticism is accepted as a necessary component of all disciplines, including politics and religion. We in the West have gotten so used to criticism that it is taught in schools and universities, demanded in the workplace (where it is usually labeled "positive feedback," or some such euphemism), and maintains a more or less quiet presence in all areas of society. When criticism in our day collides with the establishment, it is usually in the form of popular movements, like "Occupy Wall Street," or through more coherent organizations like the Tea Party. The collision, then, is not so much a social upheaval as it is a moment in a continuing dialogue, or perhaps 'polylogue'. As for being afraid of conclusions, I believe that this applies only to the private thinker, who does not have the backing of an organization. When I hesitate, for whatever reason, to share certain ideas directly with my fellows, it is usually because I am afraid of being misunderstood or even attacked. If I should, however, by utilizing the tools of our technocratic era, discover a significant number of people who share my conclusions, I will likely communicate with them, in a more or less systematic fashion. And, in our age of digital anonymity, I need not fear any backlash should my words dismay or offend -- unless, of course, I am calling for something like violent action against ill-trained and incompetent law enforcement officers, or, need I say it, jihad. In such cases, my words are in danger of being treated as actions, and then I will be placing my hand to my lips, bidding my freedom adieu (anonymity is, of course, an ever-eroding shore). Barring such extremes, if one is sufficiently passionate about his or her views, and wishes to "make a difference," one may even start a 'movement'. As Kierkegaard pointed out, over 150 years ago, an individual with crowd-pleasing ideas, no matter how half-baked or insane, may be given the stamp of legitimacy if a significant number of people parrot him.

[T]he daily press and anonymity make our age even more insane with help from 'the public', which is really an abstraction, which makes a claim to be the court of last resort in relation to 'the truth'; for assemblies which make this claim surely do not take place. That an anonymous person, with help from the press, day in and day out can speak however he pleases (even with respect to the intellectual, the ethical, the religious), things which he perhaps did not in the least have the courage to say personally in a particular situation; every time he opens up his gullet -- one cannot call it a mouth -- he can all at once address himself to thousands upon thousands; he can get ten thousand times ten thousand to repeat after him - and no one has to answer for it ... (Kierkegaard, "The Crowd is Untruth," 1847)

Unless, of course, the line separating words from action is crossed. In the domain of words, the ideas communicated thereby maintain their hold on the minds of readers or hearers to the extent that these ideas are, if not convincing, at least compelling and worthy of serious consideration. Ethically, the assumption is held that the intention of the communication is serious; the purpose is not to sophistically incite emotion, but to philosophically engage with the intellect, for the sake of deepening understanding and, ultimately, improving the human condition. For this, an atmosphere of respect is required; brutish intimidation or, the worst, outright physical violence, has no place. Speech, of course, when it is sophistical -- that is, not meant to convince through reason but to persuade through emotion -- occupies a sort of gray area between words and action. Sophism often relies upon not-so-subtle demeaning of whatever ideas (and the people who hold them) oppose the view being promoted. Open insults of the most sophomoric kind are defended by appealing to our ideal of free speech. This is disingenuous. Insults are not "speech-acts" but invitations to extra-linguistic response. Sophists often say things from the safety of their private "electronic device" or from the podium of a university conference room that they would never say, for example, at a neighborhood bar. No one has ever gained a deeper understanding of life, or found his or her condition as a human being improved, by looking down the barrel of a gun. Nor, for that matter, has anyone ever felt compelled to engage in a self-critique of his or her deeply held beliefs after seeing those beliefs mocked or 'satirized'. Granted, verbal or visual insults are less destructive -- to individuals in particular and to the fabric of society in general -- than physical violence. Yet one betrays a sad lack of psychological insight when one fails to understand how insults can trigger violent reaction -- especially among persons who feel, rightly or wrongly, that they have been systematically degraded and marginalized.

Every intelligent thinker wants to, and strives to, be taken seriously. The time and energy spent cultivating an idea, or a critique of an idea or ideology, takes a heavy emotional and physical toll on the person so engaged. So it is only natural for such a person to become rather attached to his or her intellectual offspring, and wish to see it flourish in the world. And because this offspring is the result of slow and careful rearing -- not, as is often the case among the less mentally astute, slow and careful indoctrination -- involving numerous and sometimes painful corrections, the parent will be more inclined to make further corrections if necessary. Since the entire point of this slow development is to bring into being a communicable concept that will serve as a reference-point, an impetus, for yet further development by others, criticism by others -- even so-called negative criticism -- will not be rejected out of hand or defended against, but accepted and considered and, if warranted, adopted. This is the healthy intellectual climate in which all great ideas have grown. But this will only occur in an atmosphere of respectful discourse. This does not exclude, I hasten to add, occasional levity or jocularity. A too-serious mind will quickly burn itself out. Yet there is a great difference between humor amongst friends, or at least amongst those sharing a common discourse and culture, and humor directed at those occupying a drastically different discursive and cultural realm. In short, it is the difference between laughing with, and laughing at.

It is the height of puerility to engage in mockery of an other's deeply held beliefs and then, when the consequences are too grim to bear, to pull back and say, as so many children do, "I was just kiddin'!" There is an old saying about jokes: If one has to explain a joke, it isn't funny. The beauty of well-reasoned argument is that it is explanation, and is sufficiently open-ended to permit correction in the event of misunderstanding. A joke permits no such thing. Once it is out of the mouth, or on the page (as a cartoon, for example), there is no going back. If the butt of the joke is excessively hurt or offended, there is no way to undo the damage. While there is such a thing as neurotically sensitive people, who just "can't take a joke," we are nevertheless beholden, as rational, ethical beings, to see to it that we remain aware of that sensitivity, and refrain from exacerbating what is surely a source of continual pain for our overly sensitive fellows. This is especially important when the substance of our joking deals not with minor issues such as style of dress or mannerisms, but with major topics involving identity, purpose, and conviction, such as religion and politics. Now such self-censorship is understandable at the dinner table, but is it acceptable in an established society where the sensitivity of a minority swells into a (sometimes violent) clash of cultures?

The intelligent style of criticism I have in mind, while not unique to Western cultures, certainly has no place among adherents of what I shall call pre-Enlightenment thinking. This includes not only so-called radical Islamists, but also fundamentalist Christians, white supremacist groups, ultra-conservatives, and any other group that leaves aside logic and reason for arguments based on emotions and a heavy hand or -- worse! -- divine revelation. So perhaps it is acceptable for those of us who subscribe to Enlightenment ideas (even if we sometimes use the phrase "post-Enlightenment" or some other "post-" to denote a careful critique of Enlightenment excesses) to take a firm and sometimes adversarial stance in the face of drastically opposing ideologies. Tolerance is rather easy to maintain when the "other" is simply desirous of living peacefully at home with his or her ideas; but when the "other" is actively striving to convert others (Has anyone in our post-post-modern world ever actually used "other" as a personal pronoun?) to his or her doctrine and way of life, then tolerance, as both theory and practice, must be subjected to rigorous criticism. As Gore Vidal wrote, in a fine article on "Monotheism and its Discontents" (1992):

Ordinarily, as a descendent of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which shaped our Republic, I would say live and let live and I would try not to 'scoff' -- to use Lincoln's verb -- at the monotheists. But I am not allowed to ignore them. They won't let me. They are too busy. They have a divine mission to take away our rights as private citizens.

"They" here are, of course, the Christian Right, who were and are attempting to establish a theocracy through political influence. Except for a rather small number of militant groups outside the mainstream, these fundamentalists, as odious as their ideas are, do not resort to physical violence -- even if they are masterful sophists (and sophism, when practiced upon the ignorant and uneducated, is a form of violence). So when Vidal called for "confrontation" with the "sky godders" (as he called adherents of the three monotheistic faiths) he was intending a confrontation of intellect, not of arms. Our contemporary violent jihadists, however, appear to have no interest in talking, so enlightened confrontation is not possible. But a clear articulation of Western ideals is possible, and if communicated to the world through rational discourse instead of propagandistic sloganeering -- or worst of all, military action -- these ideals may, perhaps, gain some respect from the "other," if not wholesale acceptance.

While material progress is still high on our list of desired goals, this has been tempered by considerations of the damage such striving does to the environment and to persons caught up in the mechanization -- and now technologization -- of human life. The idea remains among the enlightened that the development and realization of the authentically human is the highest goal, and indeed purpose, of life. This world is not a staging-ground for heaven, nor is it an opportunity to aggressively force as many people as possible into one's own thought-realm. And, I hasten to add, this applies to us liberal thinkers who often forget how aggressive we can be! As Emerson, in his essay on "Politics" (1844), put it so well, and presciently:

[W]henever I find my dominion over myself not sufficient for me, and undertake the direction of [my neighbor] also, I overstep the truth, and come into false relations to him. I may have so much more skill or strength than he that he cannot express adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and nature cannot maintain the assumption: it must be executed by a practical lie, namely, by force. This undertaking for another, is the blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of the world.

To force another to follow one's own direction is not only a lie, it is an act of violence. Criticism seeks to do one of two things: persuade, or convince. The ancient Sophists used fine speech and an elastic style of argument to lead the minds of their hearers to where they wanted them to go -- this is persuasion, and it only works upon the unsuspecting, or the insufficiently educated. Socrates, Plato and his followers used logic -- dialectic -- to demonstrate the falsity of every idea that was in competition with their own, and thereby convince. In this supremely humanistic agon, the mind was the final judge; truth, as Plato insisted, is always present in the soul, and requires only a gentle reminder to be brought to the fore. In both cases, as historically divergent as they were, physical violence had no place. We know that the students of Aristotle's Lyceum occasionally ventured across town to mock their peers at Plato's Academy, and we can assume that some fist-fights broke out -- but it was surely nothing remotely close to terrorism. And this juvenile ribbing took place within a shared culture. When Plato took his unique brand of philosophy afield, however, to the court of King Dionysius of Syracuse (which was Greek in language if not in ideals), he ended up giving offense, and was sold into slavery for a time. One can only imagine how Platonism would have fared if it had been taught in the courts of the early caliphs ... Oh wait! It was, with great success. We have the early Islamic commentators and translators to thank for our knowledge of Plato and most of the Classical philosophical, literary, and scientific tradition. Hmmm ...

When discourse is logical, open-ended, constructed in a manner that admits all necessary revision, everyone benefits. Disagreements, instead of becoming fuel for adversity, simply take their place as markers in the ever-growing life of critically engaged persons and cultures (and cultures, of course, are nothing more than large numbers of persons with roughly the same world-view). It is indeed ironic that Christianity, now dominated by fundamentalists (in influence if not in numbers), spent its early centuries tangling with the merciless criticism of pagan philosophers and, after the ascension of Constantine and the legitimization of the faith, with the variety of interpretations proffered by philosophical Christian theologians who had been influenced by the pagan philosophers! Despite the fact that St. Paul himself condemned philosophy as "vain deceit" and warned against the division that comes from intellectual wrangling, early Christians philosophers engaged in remarkably subtle dialectic, especially in the articulation of the Trinity. And for this, they were helped along by the writings of the Platonists, far more than the Bible, which mentions the Trinity only in a single problematical passage (1 John 5:7, occurring in a single sixteenth-century manuscript). This little-studied period of Christian history, the so-called Byzantine era, an intellectually vibrant and even "multi-cultural" period, unfortunately gave way to a fundamentalism that led to the exile of pagan intellectuals as well as unorthodox Christian thinkers, most of whom found welcome in the courts of the caliphs. Early Islamic thinkers found much of value in the Classical writings brought by these exiles, and there was a flowering of scientific, medical, and historical inquiry that was eventually bequeathed upon a benighted Europe. It would be naive to ask, as not a few scholars have, "If then, why not now?" Contemporary fundamentalist Christians and Muslims are wilfully ignorant of history. Since God is all-in-all, the argument goes, there is no need to study history, or any other human science; the divine revelation in our Book tells us all we need to know. Critical debate with such persons is impossible. This does not, however, preclude a persistent communication of humanistic -- as opposed to theistic -- ideals, with the intention not of converting anyone away from their faith, but of encouraging a more humanistic theism, if you will.

. . . . .

In my numerous incarnations, from young Surrealist poet to post-structural theorist to scholar of Christian Neoplatonism to apologist for Orthodox Christianity to (finally) atheist lover of art for art's sake, I have had the opportunity to speak with Muslims from a wide variety of backgrounds, with views conciliatory with the West, hostile to the West, and, occasionally, intelligently critical of all aspects of the complex relationship. My views were always clearly and succinctly stated: I am pro-Western, a child of the Enlightenment and proud of it. Sometimes, especially after a martini or three, I was rather blustery (to put it mildly) in my denunciation of what Vidal memorably called "sky-god religions" -- yet I was never threatened with physical violence. Why? I have already given the answer. Because I was engaged in discourse. As passionate and out-of-hand as I had sometimes gotten, I never stooped to the level of lobbing insults. Perhaps I gave the finger (as did Christopher Hitchens [another indefatigable critic of sky-god-ism], at a memorable 92nd Street Y round table, as I recall) ... but I never mocked. I never drew a cartoon. When I was done spouting, I waited -- for a response. And I listened when it came.

Of course there are those who will remind me that "they" (the terrorists) only respond with violence; open discourse is as alien to those worshippers of a war-god as the related terms "tolerance" and "pluralism." If this were true, would it not be better for those of us privileged to live in an enlightened society to -- instead of repeating boilerplate insults and drawing cartoons -- demonstrate the efficacy of rational thought and discourse? The art of philosophy is, alas, no longer widely practiced in our society, with the result that many academics -- not to mention educated laypersons (very rare, these) -- are incapable of writing clear, open-ended essays, free of jargon, that invite discussion. Many will argue that meaningful discussion, much less authentic debate, is impossible if one of the participants locates absolute authority in a sacred text, instead of seeking authority through the exercise of human reason. This is simply not true. I consider Christian fundamentalists as equally hardy in their devotion to an ancient text as conservative Muslims and Jews. I have held meaningful discussions with conservative representatives of these three religions, on many occasions. The prerequisite for each talk, of course, was careful study of the relevant sacred texts. Admittedly, I am far more familiar with the Hebrew scriptures, and the New Testament, than I am with the Koran -- but I did considerable homework. Even though I am an atheist, I uttered the honorific "peace be upon him" each time I mentioned Mohammed; and my companions showed respect by referring to the authors of the New Testament as "Saint" so-and-so. This is a small thing, and rather meaningless in the realm of ideas, but it is a sign of courtesy, and that faint injection of benign atmosphere permitted an exchange of ideas that was more than just an earnest attempt at cultural and intellectual one-upmanship. A small thing, yes, in this age of violent jihad from the East and Islamophobia from the West, but rather preferable, I think, to juvenile ribbing calling itself satire and using our ideal of free expression to justify mockery of religion. The question, then. Should a cherished freedom -- freedom of speech -- be controlled through intelligent self-censorship? If one cares more about the ethics of intellectual life, the morality of inter-cultural co-existence, than the adolescent I'll-do-what-I-want-when-I-want code of conduct, the answer is yes.

In times of multiple competing voices, a backing-away from particularities in favor of generalities can be helpful. My intention here was only to allude to the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the backlashes in Europe and the Middle East, not to write a commentary on this latest act of violent jihadist terror and the inevitable anti-Islamic response. But a few colleagues have urged me to make some kind of direct statement. So, in closing I will simply say that I condemn all acts of violence, which includes racism, nationalism, and bigotry of all kinds. Any subordination of the person to an ideology, a nation, a political party, a religion, is violence. Cries of "God is Great" are just as offensive to me as shouts of "We are Charlie." My response to such anti-personalistic foolishness is to say, There is no god, I am Edward.