On the Vital Necessity of Free Speech (are you listening, Saudis)?

Thank you all very much. Thank you, Barbara, and to everyone for, first, inviting me in, and second, for attending. So I'm gonna try to do something very difficult this evening. I'm going to try to put the idea of the rights, the right to free speech, in the broadest possible historical context.

I want to start with a comment though. You know, we have an idea built into our human rights legislation that all the rights are equal in some sense, and that can't be true because rights conflict with one another. When things conflict, they have to be hierarchically organized, and what that means is that there's an implication that there is a hierarchy of rights as well as a hierarchy of responsibilities. It's also incumbent on us to determine the nature of that hierarchy and to determine what constitutes the sovereign, let's say, the sovereign right. I would say you might think of that as a modern conundrum that would only be of interest to countries that have formalized Bills of Rights, for example. But it's not a new problem. It's an extraordinarily old problem because there's no difference between determining the hierarchy of your rights and determining how to live together successfully.

It is exactly the same problem; one's only articulated in a legal form, and the problem of how we should live together in the most productive possible manner, everything considered, is as old as mankind itself. In fact, I would say far older than that because the same problem bedeviled social animals way down the phylogenetic chain. And so, this is an unbelievably archaic problem. Now, years ago when I started thinking, I suppose in earnest, I was trying to address what I later recognized as a postmodern problem.

The problem was, this was in the late 70s and early 80s when the Cold War was madly raging. Because it peaked in 1962 and it peaked again in about 1984, thereabouts. Of course, at that time, people were very terrified about the potential outcome of the Cold War, and for very good reason. I was curious; very curious about this, like insanely curious about it. It was obsessing me. I couldn't understand two things. I couldn't understand why the world had divided itself into two opposing narratives, why that would happen at all, and also why these narratives were of such importance to people, apparently, that we were willing to arm ourselves far beyond the teeth and risk massive mutual annihilation to battle out that conflict between these two ways of looking at the world.

I was curious. I mean, the first question was, were these merely two ways of looking at the world? Because you might think, well, there’s no shortage of ways to live in the world. That's a morally relativistic stance, and there's something to that, obviously, because different people have different occupations, and they have different outlooks and so forth, different political beliefs. So there's obviously many ways that we can thrive in the world, and so some degree of flexibility with regards to what constitutes your fundamental axioms, obviously, is necessary.

But there's a deeper question, and it is a very deep question. I actually think it's the question at the bottom of the postmodern conundrum, which is whether or not there are any reliable meta-narratives, let's say overarching narratives, that can unite people in some fundamental way. And so I was curious, were these just two arbitrary ways of looking at the world, both potentially equally valid? Were we battling that out because we didn't know when there was no other way to battle it out? Or was there something deeper at stake? Was it possible that one or the other system was correct in some deep manner?

I believe—I do truly believe—that I entered that universe of questions, let's say, with as open a mind as possible because I actually wanted to find out the answer. You know, because, well, it seemed to me the fundamental question that obviously we fought a whole Cold War about. It was the fundamental question. Who was this? It was the question everyone's mind should have been concentrated on.

I started to study deeply this particular question. The first question was, well, what were beliefs made out of? Like what exactly is it? What are we talking about when we talk about a belief? What does it mean that you have beliefs? Are beliefs structured? And also, that was a psychological question rather than a political or economic question.

And that took me a long time to figure out because I didn't know if the fundamental question was going to be sociological, political, economic, or psychological—it turned out to be psychological, or perhaps it turned out to be spiritual. That's another way of thinking about it. And if you could grasp belief, what would constitute a credible belief and what would it mean for a belief to be credible?

I can give you a little hint about that. I learned this from Jean Piaget, that developmental psychologist, a brilliant, brilliant theorist, a genuine genius. He was interested in how children organized games, and he thought of games, the organization of games by children, as the precursor to adult interaction. He made some very interesting observations about games, you know, especially pretend games, which are quite sophisticated. Because children will get together and play pretend games, and what they'll do is they act out a simulation of the world. Maybe they play house; they all get together and they cast each other in different roles, and then they each act out those roles.

They do that in order to simulate something important that they're going to have to adapt to. But Piaget noted a couple of things. The first thing, you know, was that children playing games can play the games in a group. Thank you very much. They can play a game in a group. But if you take them out of the group and you ask them what the rules of the game are, they don't know. They can't articulate the rules of the game yet. When you put them together in the group, they can play the game.

I thought, oh, that's just like adults, you see? Because, well, because we wouldn't need a psychology otherwise, right? Because we'd all be transparent to ourselves already. So what that means is when we all get together and play a game, like the one that we're playing in this room, for example, we all can play the game when we're together. But if we branched out and said, "Well, what are the rules?" we wouldn't be able to articulate them.

Then I thought, well, that means that those rules evolved in a real sense. Like they've evolved in a behavioral competition. And I thought, well, that's a lot like what's happening with animals. If you look at how a chimpanzee troop is organized, or a wolf pack—any social animal for that matter, going way down the phylogenetic chain—they have to interact with one another in a manner that sustains the group because otherwise they all die, obviously. And that sustains the individuals within the group and offers the individual some scope of action.

So there's a set of implicit constraints on the manner in which creatures interact, or they don't live. Piaget also came to the same conclusion with regards to children's games. And this is where he made a distinction that's so crucial because Piaget was actually interested in bridging the gap between science and religion. That was his fundamental motivation, although very few people know that. He was interested in bridging the gap between science and ethics, and he was interested in how ethics evolved as a concept and then as something that was practically applicable.

He made some very interesting comments about games and said, "Well look, what constitutes a good game?" Well, one rule is everybody plays voluntarily. That's a really good game. And then he made another claim which was quite cool, which was imagine that you had game A and game B, and they were competing against a target. In game B, people were being forced to play, and in game A, people were playing voluntarily. Then you tracked their track record with regards to competitive advantage over time. The game that people were playing voluntarily would win because the people who were playing wouldn't have to waste any effort on enforcement costs.

Oh god, that's so smart! It's so smart because you can see the idea of the emergence of an ethic theory, and not an ethic that's rationally constructed. It's an ethic that's actually emerging from the bottom up. Now, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also pointed out that our ethic actually emerged from the bottom up; it wasn't rational. It wasn't top down. It wasn't enlightenment-oriented, even though the Enlightenment might have codified it as part of a process of codification that took place over a very long period of time.

Then I read other things some say about the way that animals organize their troops. This was later, but it's relevant to our talk today. That primatologist Frans de Waal, for example, has tried to find out what makes chimpanzee troops stable across time. You kind of have this idea that a chimpanzee troop is driven, let's say, by the most dominant, powerful male; the most aggressive, cruel, tyrannical chimpanzee dominates, and that isn't what Frans de Waal found. What he found was that in order for those sorts of chimpanzee troops to have leaders, they meet very violent ends.

Because no matter how tyrannical you are as a top chimp, two chimps three-fourths your size can take you out, and they will. Chimpanzees are unbelievably brutal, and very, very strong. Tyrannical chimpanzee troops are unstable. It's like, that's a major league discovery, ma’am, because it starts to open up the possibility that the ethic upon which functional states are predicated is far deeper than any mere story or any mere rationality.

That's a really exciting possibility because what it means is that there might be something at the bottom of our ethic that’s really there. It's not just some arbitrary constructed narrative. It's not just one set of ways to live in the world among many. I would say, and I tried to outline this partly in "Twelve Rules for Life" and more in detail in "Maps of Meaning," that the evidence on that is already in. Is that there is a convergent ethic that emerges from the bottom up over evolutionary spans of time—over millions of years, over hundreds of thousands of years, over tens of thousands of years—as people learn how to act in a manner that sustains them as individuals, now, and a week from now, and a month from now, and a year from now.

So it has to be iterated—that sustains them and their families simultaneously, that sustains them and their families and their communities across all those time frames simultaneously. And that's a very, very tight set of constraints. And so there might be a very large number of ways to interpret the world, as the postmodernists accurately have it, but there are not a very large number of ways to exist successfully in the world. In fact, it's extraordinarily constrained. It's constrained by the necessity of playing an iterative, voluntary game, and that's a tight constraint.

As any of you who are married know, right? Well, I mean, there's absolutely definitively, because you see, marriage is a very interesting balancing act. Because it has to be good for you, and it has to be good for your wife, let’s say, but it also has to be good for the two of you, and it has to be maybe that superordinate to each of you as individuals, and it has to be good for you in a way that's good for your children. And that has to work in society, and it has to be something that you can play out moment by moment, an hour to hour, and day to day, and month to month, and week to week.

And you know perfectly well that there isn't much deviation from the straight and narrow path if you're going to play that game because there's just too many ways of falling into trouble. And there's way more ways of falling into trouble than not falling into trouble. Okay, so that's the first thing. So imagine this. So this is the idea. The ethic emerges from the bottom up as we learn how to organize ourselves in ever more complex, sustainable societies.

And we don't know what we're doing, okay? But then what happens is because we're insanely curious and capable of self-recognition, we start to tell stories about how it is that we're acting. And the stories have two forms. One story is about the structures that we exist in, and that's the stories about other people and every story's about other people, right? Because we live in a social world, and you never see a story, you never go to a movie, you never read a novel that isn't about society.

And no wonder because that's our environment, society. So stories are about society, and they're about how societies succeed and fail, and they're about how individuals within that society succeed or fail because what we're trying to do is to watch ourselves. And I mean, again, over the mass of a historical time frame, we're trying to watch how it is that we act when we act properly and figure out how to do it as individuals.

And the first way we do that is to code it in stories. That's what stories are for. That's what great literature is for. That's why there are great villains and great heroes in great literature, because you want to know how to be a great hero unless you want to be a great villain. And if you want to be a great hero, you can learn from great villains the opposite of how to act. And so you get incredibly sophisticated representations emerging out of that process so that they take on an archetypal form.

So for example, the motif of the hostile brothers, which is developed into Christianity, into the adversaries of Christ and Satan, or Cain and Abel, are the idea of the hero who thrives in the social world and brings renewal to the cosmos, so to speak, against the deadly adversary. And that's exactly what you need to know, and again, it's not arbitrary. It's not an arbitrary set of propositions. It's predicated on the observation of successful and unsuccessful patterns of behavior over very, very, very, very long stretches of time.

So there's a behavioral platform, and then there's a narrative representation of that platform. Then the two things start to interact because once you have drama and literature, you can learn from drama and literature and alter how you behave. The ethic becomes portable. And then what happens after that is that thinkers, who now have both the behavioral strata and the representational strata in front of them, right? The procedural ethic, the behavioral ethic, plus the story representation, step one step back from that, especially after it's written down.

This is why works like the Bible are of such critical importance, because the dramatic patterns are then written down and then you can step back from them with your consciousness and you can start to analyze them for their rule-based content. You see that emerging to some degree in the story of Moses. That's actually what's laid out in part in the story of Moses because Moses is leading his people through the desert and watching how they fight and watching how they behave, and then he has this tremendous revelation, which is, this is how we already act, right?

And so what happens is the rules are codified on the basis of the observation of the patterns that are already extant, that are functional. That's a transformation of consciousness. At that point, you have, let's say, true philosophy at the beginning of the body of laws. It’s called the body of laws for a reason. So, well, I thought that was all just amazing to have observed that, to think about that bottom-up process. And then I started reading a lot of religious mythology, and I ran across this motif that was developed very in great detail by Romanian Mircea Eliade, who was a great scholar of religions. Remarkable, remarkable books, including a history of religious ideas, which is a highly recommended book.

He talked about this interesting motif that I had run across in other writings on mythology and in religious stories, which was the battle of the gods in heaven across time. One of the things Eliade pointed out was that if you looked at the development of religious systems—so say, the development of the religious system that came to dominate Mesopotamia—when the Mesopotamian tribes came together, imagine each of those tribes had their own god, right? And then when they came together, that was terribly fractious because you know what happens when different people with different gods get together. It's ugly. It's ugly, and it's no wonder because they all have an ethic. They’re living within the ethic and they're using it to structure their worlds, but the ethics apparently collide.

So what happens at the civilizational level is that there's constant negotiation and cognitive transformation within the individual populations. But that's represented over the large span of time as a battle between the gods that represent the different tribes in heaven. And so then what happens across time is all those gods organize themselves into a hierarchy, and one god comes out on top, and that god is the supreme god. And then, in societies like Mesopotamia, that also happened in ancient Greece; they assumed that their sovereign is that the person who acts out the sovereign god.

Because you might say, well, where does the concept of sovereignty come from, right? If it's not just brute force... and if brute force doesn't work, it has to have some other basis. What's the basis of sovereignty? What's the basis of authority? Not power, authority, competence. Authority, right? Well, how's that played out? It's played out by the battle between systems of ethics that are represented in religious language across vast epochs of time, and then the societies of gods, let's say, organize themselves into a hierarchy and they have a god at the top.

That's actually laid right out in the Enuma Elish, for example, which is the oldest creation story that we have and out of which it's derived from the same, what would you say, cultural substrate as the stories in Genesis, for example, although it represents a variant. The Mesopotamians had all their gods aggregate themselves together because they were threatened by the unknown. That's what happens in the Mesopotamian creation myth. The unknown gives rise to the gods; they become very fractious and compete, and then the unknown decides to destroy them, again like God destroying Noah’s people in the flood. It's the same basic idea. There’s an idea there, and the idea is that we emerge out of the unknown and we’re always threatened by it, not only as individuals but as a group.

And that means that we need to figure out what it is that should guide us in order to continually confront the unknown and prevail. And so what happens in Mesopotamia is the gods all get together in a congress and they basically elect a new god, a new kind of god. His name is Marduk, by the way; he has eyes all the way around his head, so he pays attention. That's not the same as thinking, it's a different thing—attention. It's the same thing the Egyptians represented and worshiped with the Eye of Horus: the idea that what you should do if you want to survive in this world, if you want to play a voluntary game that everybody could participate in, your bloody eyes better be open because those are the things that will save you.

And that's attention. The other thing that Marduk did was he spoke magic words, and so when he spoke, the night sky would appear, the day sky would appear. So the Mesopotamians figured out in their great religious story that the fundamental sovereign god was he who pays attention and speaks the truth. And that's something... that’s something... that’s not something you punish people for, right? Because this is the deepest idea of mankind. It’s developed in detail in Genesis in the Old Testament. It’s the fundamental idea of Genesis that God uses the logos, the word of God, to cast potential, which we all face. That’s what we face—potentials, right?

You know that. You know that. The future is unstructured. You have a potential within you that can meet that, and there’s a potential that characterizes the future. You meet it with eyes open and with truthful speech. And that’s what happens in Genesis because God uses the logos—which is truthful speech—to cast the pre-cosmogonic potential into habitable order, and then he says it’s good. And there’s a hint there, right? Because you think, well, is habitable order good? Because life is very difficult, and it’s a real question whether or not the order that we inhabit is good.

The hypothesis in the Old Testament is that if truthful speech gives rise to the order, then that order will be good. And that's really something that’s really something to apprehend. It’s a fundamental theological presupposition that the way that you take the potential upon which the cosmos is predicated and cast it into the order that allows everyone to thrive is by using truthful speech. Wouldn't it be something if that was the case? And the thing is, you know, it’s the case. You know it. You know it because you do not admire yourself if you're deceitful. You admire yourself when you have those rare moments in your life where you can actually stand up and say what’s true, regardless of the cost.

And if you give that respect to other people, if you treat them as if they're the locale of the divine speech that casts potential into habitable order, then they like you; maybe they even love you, and they get along with you, and you could work with them, and you can cooperate with them, and you can compete with them. So not only is it the fundamental axiom that regulates your relationship with yourself, it’s the fundamental axiom that regulates your interactions with other people. And if you do not give them that honor, which is the presupposition for their natural right, right, because the idea that you have a natural right is the idea that you have some sort of intrinsic value.

If you don't treat people as if they have that intrinsic right, they are not happy with you, even if they don't know why. Because everyone wants to be treated as if they have free will and as if they confront potential and as if they're capable of making moral choices and that they should be rewarded when they do things right and perhaps punished when they do things wrong. Everyone wants that, and everyone knows it.

And so, well, so what does that all have to do with free speech? Well, yes, everything! That's exactly right. So free speech isn't free speech—you know, people think of free speech as kind of like a decoration or something like that in your life, and it's not that at all. It’s not the ability to speak truth to power, although it is also that.

It's not that; it's way more than that! Free speech is how you think. It's not thinking. You know that the word that Genesis relies on to create the cosmos, let’s say in the story—by the way, that’s the image of God in which you’re made, male and female—that gives you that fundamental value that’s at the core of our idea of natural right? It’s not thinking; it’s speaking!

And the reason for that is, look, first of all, you can hardly think. It’s really hard to think. You have to be trained like mad to think. You have to be able to divide yourself internally into a couple of different people, and then you have to let those people have a war in your head. That means you have to develop characters who have opinions in great detail—opinions that might be contrary to your own. And then you have to withstand the tension of letting them have it out.

And you only see that thinking in great literature. Like, you see that in Dostoyevsky. He’s an absolute master of that, and you know, you can think a little bit, but mostly, you're biased. You have confirmation bias, and you see things the way you see them, and you have massive blind spots, and you're ignorant as hell! You just... you just can't think. But you can talk, and the thing is if you talk, other people will correct you. That’s the thing.

And that’s thinking. So if you get up and you have something to say and you say it stupidly—because of course you will, because what do you know—then other people will tell you where you’re wrong, and then you can learn, right? And then everybody can think.

And so what that also means is that to be free to speak, even to tell the truth, means you have to be free to be stupid and ignorant and malevolent and bitter, because that is who you are. That is what you are because you're flawed. So the idea that, you know, you can’t use your free speech if it’s offensive, it’s just... it’s an idea that is so evident—no, I don’t know if it’s naivety or malevolence. It’s a real battle between which of those two things are worse.

I would go with malevolence because it attacks something that’s so absolutely fundamental. It’s like, well, of course, people who are speaking freely are going to be offensive. I mean, have you ever had a serious discussion with anyone in your life— and I mean a serious discussion? I mean the sort of discussion you have when you’re with your wife when you're wondering whether your marriage is going to survive, or with your kids when they've done something that is really not in their best long-term interest?

I mean a serious discussion. You can’t even get off the ground without being offensive. You can't get off the ground without offending yourself in a conversation like that. You don't even want to admit how you feel or how you think to yourself if you think you can have a difficult conversation without offending people.

All that means is you're not having a difficult conversation. Because for an easy conversation, by definition, no one gets upset about that. There’s no real problem. There’s no real disagreement. There’s no real-world problem to be solved. It’s just trivial. It’s like discussing, you know, last night’s sports event. There’s nothing to it. If you’re going to have a conversation about something that matters—you know, in the world made out of what matters, that’s a good thing to remember.

If you're going to have a discussion about what matters, if you're really going to talk about it, everyone is going to be offended by that! Especially if there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark and you happen to be the one in Tripoli that’s pointing it out. So then you think, “Well, your freedom of speech—that's not about you being able to speak truth to power. That's about you being able to chart your destiny in the world.”

And more than that, it’s even more than that. It’s important enough because you know life is hard. And if you don't get to think when you walk through your life, you will fall into a pit. There’s no doubt about that because that’s what thinking is for—to stop you from having any more catastrophes that are absolutely necessary, and it’s a terribly difficult process.

So if that’s interfered with, it isn’t that you don’t get to speak truth to power; it’s that you do not get to act in the world in a manner that allows you to eliminate endless unnecessary hellish suffering—not just for you, but for you and your family and your community. And so the enemies of free speech, they’re the enemies of the process that turns potential into habitable order. They’re the enemies of the divine principle! And worse, they’re their own enemies, right? Because this isn't, well, some of us believe in free speech and some of us don’t. It’s way deeper than that!

If you don’t believe in free speech, you don’t believe in the implicit divinity of mankind. You don’t believe in the sovereignty of the individual. You don’t believe in sovereignty as such. You’re a totalitarian of some sort, which means you attribute all the divine power to yourself. And then we know where that leads, right? It doesn't matter whether it’s on the right or the left. If we had any sense and we took a look at 20th-century history, we know exactly where things go, and we could easily choose not to go there.

And so when we see someone like Raif Badawi, who’s imprisoned by a reprehensible dictatorship that we have the gall to call our allies, then what we see is a system that’s not only hell-bent on the destruction of an innocent and good man, but directly antithetical to everything that all of us have. And there are societies put forward as necessary to the continual betterment of being itself.

And so I’ve been so absolutely appalled by the Western world’s weak response to the attacks of totalitarians upon our freedom of speech. What was done with Salman Rushdie—that was a big, big, big, big mistake, right? Because it wasn’t Rushdie. It was the free-speaking artistic tradition of the West, and not only of the West, right? The free-speaking artistic creative tradition upon which the cosmos is properly established. That’s what it was. And we all bowed down with no resistance whatsoever. It was a massive error.

We’re going to pay for that for a very long time. We did the same thing with the Danish cartoons. And you don’t want to think about these sorts of things as happening far away. Nothing happens far away. When it happened somewhere else, it’s happening right here, too. And that’s why we’re all here today, because we recognize that at least on some level, and we have to stop! We need to stop being so naive about our, let’s say, moral relativism.

We need to take a look at history and biology in a very, very fundamental way, and we need to really understand what our culture—what our culture and genuine cultures everywhere—are predicated on, and that is the idea that the sovereign voice of the individual is the power that casts potential into habitable being and restructures tyrannical order when it needs to be restructured, right?

And that’s what each of us are—that's the divine presence in each of us. And I do believe that there is no more fundamental truth than that. I don’t believe that you can date down underneath that. I think that’s bedrock. That’s the foundation stone of the house. That’s the cornerstone of the house. And it requires everyone to courageously confront the tyranny that’s them and the unknown that surrounds them and to work for their own benefit and for the benefit of their families, and for the benefit of their communities, and to do everything they can to benefit the world and to live with true speech as the highest value.

That’s how we sort out the world! And we could sort it out! We are sorting it out at a very rapid rate! And we could do that much, much more effectively if—now—I do believe that it’s incumbent on us to understand the absolutely fundamental role that these processes take. I know we’re here today because we all have at least an intimation of that, right? We know that there’s something about free speech that’s so central that we cannot allow attacks on it to go unchallenged, no matter where they occur.

But it’s very useful to have it articulated and to know that this is bedrock, right? And it’s not something arbitrary, and it’s not a mere game—a mere game that we’re only playing in the West! None of that! It’s something—it’s the most fundamental truth that the human race has ever discovered. And we lose it at our absolute peril.

And it's not death, it's worse than that—the peril. Because there are worse things than death, and the worst thing than death is hell. And we saw plenty of that in the 20th century. And when we let freedom of speech go, that’s where we’re headed. And unless we want to go there, then we should stop aiming for it.

So well, thank you very much for the invitation. Good night.