
We Must Defend Free Thought - andrenth
https://quillette.com/2019/02/24/we-must-defend-free-thought/
======
peatmoss
I feel there is a gap between left goals and left means. It’s particularly
distressing to me because I always viewed “our team” as the side that was
cooler headed, would wrestle with uncomfortable ideas, and would keep trying
to find the merit in people that we disagree with.

But I find myself feeling that a portion of the left has retained the banner
issues of the left, while adopting a shockingly tribal worldview and
conservative tactics of the right.

It feels like when I was younger, and you'd say something critical about some
aspect of the US, and the retort was, “if you hate our country so much, why
don’t you just leave.” Critique was rounded to anti-American sentiment and you
thus became a valid target of unlimited scorn.

I see the same thing on the left, where if you don’t agree to a reductive
expression of certain wedge issues, people are rounded to nazi, misogynist,
X-phobic, etc. and then are irredeemably subject to unlimited scorn.

I expect this kind of stuff from the right, but it’s painful to see it from
the left.

~~~
Decathect
The First Amendment didn’t prevent our genocide of native peoples. Democracy
didn’t prevent 100 years of slavery. ‘The marketplace of ideas’ didn’t keep us
from torturing people to death or killing a million people in a pointless war.

The problem with liberals is they mistake the means for the end. Because their
lives are insulated from consequence, they prefer the “negative peace which is
the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice”.
They have a fairytale understanding of the world, where Nazism can be stopped
with debate instead of carpet bombings.

What matters is that the hungry are fed, the sick are treated, and the
vulnerable protected, and that everyone can live free of the threat of
violence or deprivation. Decorum and the delicate feelings of bigots do not
matter.

~~~
qball
>The First Amendment didn’t prevent our genocide of native peoples. Democracy
didn’t prevent 100 years of slavery. ‘The marketplace of ideas’ didn’t keep us
from torturing people to death or killing a million people in a pointless war.

You don't seem to understand the function of the things you dismiss. The First
Amendment, Democracy, and trust in the Marketplace of Ideas exist to make sure
that society's mind can be changed as easily as is practically possible. It's
not a guarantee that society will get it right, __it 's an escape hatch for
when society gets it wrong __.

And when we look at everywhere else, where those escape valves don't exist,
you get nothing but mass murder as a direct result of unquestionable,
unassailable government/popular policy. Think of how much more difficult it
would be to change society's mind about separate-but-equal or nonstandard
sexual orientations if you weren't able to talk about or vote on them in the
first place; you'd never have the kind of cultural revolution you had in
America in the 1950s-70s without the ability to first persuade people it
should happen.

>Decorum and the delicate feelings of bigots do not matter.

Despite what you may want to believe, you are not the one who decides who is
and is not a bigot. Expose your life to the logical consequence of that; I
don't think you're going to like what that statement fully implies.

~~~
Decathect
I think you missed my point: all those things can be tools for accomplishing a
just society, but they are not sufficient or an end in themselves.

Slavery was ended by war. Labor rights were achieved by fatal street battles.
The civil rights movement was legitimized by a growing threat of a domestic
insurrection. Marriage equality was established by an unelected Supreme Court.
Basically every time significant positive change has happened in this country
has been the result of extrademocratic leverage being found and exercised, not
going hat in hand to ask an uncaring majority for what you are due as a human
being.

Finally, as a moral being with obligations to others I absolutely get to
decide who is a bigot, just as you do.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
To deny any progress happens under democratic rule, is going too far?

~~~
Decathect
I mean, all those positive changes happened in an ostensibly democratic system
and were later ratified by it. They just didn’t happen because ‘moderates’
were convinced by logical argument to grant people basic rights through the
ballot box.

That’s the farce, that political change happens through some cosplay
conception of an Athenian forum instead of the accumulation and exercise of
power. It’s a fact that fascists know instinctively and the left has been
waking up to. For liberals, who are enthralled by process and satisfied with
the status quo, the threat of change is more serious than the reality of
injustice.

------
derblitzmann
This is something I know well, since I prefer to keep quiet about x political
opinion at work. Since if I'm not perfectly in the expected mold, it could
sour relationships critical to my career.

