There’s an idea that’s been percolating in the back of my head for a while. Or more precisely, a collision of two separate ideas, each coming from a place of good intention.
Government power is not the only power to be concerned about. There are other powers in society–social, economic, cultural–that can also unfairly impinge upon people’s liberties.
Only government suppression of speech is censorship. Private suppression of speech is a matter of individual rights. It’s no infringement upon a speaker’s liberty to refuse to lend your voice to their ideas, nor to attempt to persuade others take your view of the acceptability of a certain forms of speech.
These don’t really go well together, but I often see both ideas put forward (at different times) by a single group or individual. It kind of makes you wonder just what exactly they mean by “free speech” doesn’t it?
I don’t have any pithy answers here. Just a whole lot of questions.
It’s an interesting contradiction.
I guess this is where I focus on these questions:
1. The importance of power. In an environment of shrinking civil liberties, the distribution and exercise of power becomes ever more critical because the caprices of employers, authorities or the market, rather than Constitutional rights, determine more of a person’s conditions. When individual rights (at least those not related to guns) dwindle, there is little to check the imposition of the will of the powerful besides allying with another powerful entity, which generally implies some trade for its protection – and the withdrawal of that protection at a whim.
2. The specificity of “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” is proof that the Founding Fathers were hardly the omniscient demigods certain current Supreme Court Justices seem to think. If an employer fires someone for voicing an opinion contrary to company policy, this is ok; if the President writes a signing statement declaring anticapitalist discussions illegal, no foul; if the local country club votes to bar Jews, all is well. This phrasing is a fuckup of high magnitude, as it has not only given us 2+ centuries of fuzzy thinking on the very definition of censorship, it has also contributed to the jurisdictional morass of the US: can states restrict speech? Can counties ban Islam? Can a city shut down a newspaper… Oh, wait, what’s a newspaper?
So these two factors work together in a positive feedback loop: because the First Amendment was poorly defined and has been interpreted narrowly and literally, the personal liberties specified by it have been limited; because personal liberties are limited, more aspects of people’s lives are subject to the exercise of power rather than the protection of law.
If this is unsatisfactory (and I certainly think so), that feedback process must be interrupted. Either power must be redistributed more evenly, or protections must be extended to cover non-Congressional actors. Since there is much more organization and power on the side of accelerating it instead, it looks to get more uneven and repressive before it gets better.
Nice blog, btw.