The totalitarian heart still beats to the drum beat of speech suppression

I ran across this old opinion piece, from Words Aren't Violence by Jonathan Rauch. Nothing unique about the opinion. It is that of any Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberal. I subscribe to it.

But it helps pin down the transition from an era when freedom of speech was both assumed and taken for granted into our modern era when free speech is frowned upon and suppressed. I had, in various discussions, sort of narrowed the window to 1990-1995. This piece suggests the transition was already notable by June 26, 1993.

When I published an article arguing that harsh and hurtful words are an inevitable part of the search for knowledge, a writer replied: "You cannot forbid physical violence and permit verbal violence." This line of thinking -- what I call the humanitarian attack on liberal debate -- is behind much of what's going on today.

Why have so many campus speech codes cropped up? Why so many new hate-speech and hate-crime laws? Why so much pressure from PC activists to curtail offensive expression? Offensive words are nothing new.

What's new is the humanitarian objection to free speech: Hurtful talk, like physical violence, causes pain and thereby violates the human rights of its targets.

Like Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism, the humanitarian attack is seductive, principled and dangerous: seductive because it seems to promise an end to victimization and suffering, principled because it is powered by moral outrage, dangerous because it leads to authoritarian control of speech and inquiry.

Until the concept of "verbal violence" is discredited, it will keep inspiring activists to hunt for legal ways to restrict speech. It will eat at the moral foundation of the liberal intellectual system, a system that sorts sound beliefs from frivolous ones by means of robust and, yes, often hurtful criticism.

That system's premise is that hurtful words are not like violence. When someone calls me "redneck," "fruit," or "water buffalo," I have a choice. I can view him as a human rights violator who ought to be punished, or as a man wearing a sign that says "I am a jerk." The humanitarians say I should expect society to take the former view. I say it should expect me to take the latter view. That's what the argument is about, and it won't be over soon.

Rauch's concluding paragraph is prescient.

We free-speechers like to dismiss PC partisans as radical loonies, academic faddists and power-hungry politicians. Doubtless some are. But to dismiss them with a snort while waving the First Amendment, as conservatives and civil libertarians tend to do, is to underestimate the appeal and staying power of their argument. Only by moving beyond ridicule can we hope to kill PC.

Twenty-five years on, the totalitarian heart still beats to the drum beat of speech suppression.