Why I’m So Obsessed with Free Speech...

I don't think free speech is a right among other rights. I think that, I don't think there's any difference between free speech and thought, and it has to be free because if it's not free, it's not thought. So imagine mostly you have to think about hard things because why think otherwise? If everything's going all right, you don't have a problem. When you have a problem, you have to think, and if you have a problem, the thinking is going to be troublesome because you're going to think things that upset yourself and upset other people. It's part of the necessity; it's part of what will necessarily happen if you're thinking.

Um, I just want to repeat you said something that just stopped me—sorry, because I actually stopped. It stopped me so completely cold that I missed a little bit of what followed. I just want to repeat it: there is no difference between speech and thought. If you're going to have free thought, you must have free speech. That's the argument.

Yeah, yeah, okay, well I'll unpack that first and then return to the other one. Well there's a bunch of reasons for that. I mean, first of all, mostly you think in words. Now, people also think in images, but I'm not going to go into that; we'll just leave that aside. But mostly we think in words, and so we use a mechanism that's sociologically constructed: the world of speech, to organize our own psyches. We do that with speech.

Basically, when you think, there's two components to it that are internal in a sense. When you think you have a problem, so you ask yourself a question, and then answers appear in the theater of your imagination, generally verbally. So that'd be like the revelatory element of thought. That's very much prayer-like in some fundamental sense because it's very mysterious. You know, the fact that you can pose yourself a question and then you can generate answers—it's like, well, why did you have the question if you can generate the answers? If the answers are just there, where do the answers come from?

Well, you can give a materialist account to some extraordinarily limited degree, but phenomenologically, it's still the case that you pose a question to yourself in speech, and you receive an answer in speech. Now, it can also be an image—forget about that. Then the next question is, what do you do once you receive the answer? The answer is, well, if you can think, then you use internal speech to dissect the answer, which is what you do, for example, you encourage your students to do if they're writing an essay. You know, they lay out a proposition, and then you hope they can take the proposition apart.

Essentially, what they're doing is they're transforming themselves into avatars—speaking avatars of two different viewpoints. So you have the speaker for the proposition, and then you have the critic. Maybe you lay out the dialogue between them, and that constitutes the body of the essay. You have to be bloody sophisticated to manage that because it means that you have to divide yourself, in some sense, into two avatars that are oppositional. Then you have to allow yourself to be the battle space between them. That and people have to be trained to do that. That's what universities are supposed to do; it's really hard.

What people generally do instead of that is talk to other people, and that's how they organize themselves—by talking to other people. Then the reason you have the right to free speech isn't so that you can just say whatever you want to gain a hedonistic advantage, which is one way of thinking about it. You just get you have a right to say whatever you want, like you have a right to do what you want, you know, subject to certain limitations. So it's like, it's a hedonic freedom.

It's like no, that's not why you have a right to free speech. You have a right to free speech because the entirety of society depends on this, depends for its ability to adapt to the changing horizon of the future on the free thought of the individuals who compose it. It's like a free market in some sense; it's a free market argument in relation to thought. We have to compute this transforming horizon. Well, how do we do that? Well, by consciously engaging with possibility.

Well, how do we do that? Well, it's mediated through speech. So societies that are going to function over any reasonable amount of time have to leave their citizens alone to grapple stupidly with complexity so that out of that stupid grappling—fraught grappling—that's offensive and difficult and upsetting, we can grope towards the truth collectively before taking the steps to implement those truths before they've been tested.

So then you might—so that's the free speech argument. The divinity argument is, while you are that locus of consciousness—that's what you are most fundamentally. And the reason that's associated with divinity—that's a very, very complicated question—but part of the reason, I outlined this in my series on the biblical series on Genesis, is at the beginning of Genesis—for example, so imagine this divinity of the individuals rooted in the narrative conception that's part and parcel of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

You have God at the beginning of time, in whose image men and women are made, acting as the agent that transforms the chaos of potential into the habitable reality that is good. He uses the word—the divine word, logos—to do that. And what that implies is that the word that's truthful—there's more to it than that, but the word that is truthful is the word that extracts habitable order out of chaos, and that's what characterizes human beings: that capability.

And I think, yeah, that's right. So then you might ask, do you believe that? I would say, well, that's what your culture is based on. So you might say, I don't believe that; it's like, fair enough—say what you want, but try acting. Try basing your personal relationships on any other conception than that and see what happens. You know, people are so desperate to be treated in that manner that it's their primary motivation.

You want other people to treat you as if you have something to say, that you're worth attending to. You know that you have the opportunity to express yourself, no matter how badly you do it. And if they're willing to grant you their attention and time to help you straighten that out, there isn't anything you want more than that. And if you try to structure your social relationships on any other basis than that intrinsic respect for their intrinsic value, it's going to fail.