Jonathan Rauch on the New Attacks on Free Thought
2015-01-17 · Guest: Jonathan Rauch (Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution) · 52:31
The necessity of protecting hate speech
Bob Zadek and Jonathan Rauch discuss the necessity of protecting even the most offensive “hate speech” to ensure social progress and the protection of minority rights. Rauch argues that the gay rights movement succeeded not by silencing bigots, but by using free speech to expose and refute hateful ideas in the public square.
Topics: Free Speech, First Amendment, Hate Speech, Gay Rights, Frank Kameny, Campus Speech Codes, Obscenity Laws, Charlie Hebdo, Salman Rushdie
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Jonathan Rauch: Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of The Kindly Inquisitors
- Salman Rushdie: Author (recorded clip)
Defining Hate Speech and the American Exception [00:09]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, every Sunday at 9:00 AM. I am your host, Bob Zadek. Thanks so much for listening. We are the only live libertarian talk show on the air all weekend. This is it. This is your dose of libertarian thought and opinion. 800-345-5639 to join the conversation at any time with any thought. All views are always welcome.
I should supplement my introduction by saying this is the Bob Zadek Show, the show that dares to ask the question: Is hate speech good for America? I think we’ll reach a surprising answer to that question. Hate speech. Hate speech is informally defined as offensive and abusive speech insulting usually a minority group or smaller segment of society designed to diminish and demean them.
The United States is maybe the only country in the world—certainly the only first-world country—which does not prohibit hate speech as such. Most of Europe, Canada, most of the free world prohibits hate speech. We do not. In fact, it is specifically—well, not specifically—it is permitted under all our applicable state and federal laws.
Would you prefer to live in a society where hate speech was limited or prohibited, or would you prefer to live in a society such as ours where hate speech is permitted and cannot be prevented, at least not by government? These are not easy questions. Therefore, to help us understand and find the answers to these not-so-easy questions, I’m happy to welcome to the show Jonathan Rauch.
Jonathan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He’s written for the National Journal and The Atlantic, and he is the recipient of a 2005 National Magazine Award, which is sort of the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. Jonathan has written several books, most recently Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul, and appropriate to this show, he has written The Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, available on Amazon. Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us this Sunday morning.
Jonathan Rauch: Thank you, Bob. It’s a treat to be here.
Bob Zadek: Jonathan, is hate speech good for America?
Jonathan Rauch: Allowing hate speech is good for America. And I’m a personal beneficiary of it because I am a gay American and was born in a country that was saturated in hatred and hate speech against gay people—some intended as hateful, but most of it actually well-intentioned. And the way you get rid of that and change a society’s mind is by identifying that hate, confronting the fears that underlie it, and contrasting the truth against it. And that’s how gay people in America have made the incredible progress we did: by putting ourselves up against the hate speech, looking better by comparison with it. Perversely, although obviously we don’t like it, we need it. It plays a role in getting us all to higher ground.
Bob Zadek: It’s fascinating, Jonathan. You said so many important thoughts in that one paragraph. You said, most importantly, that while one cannot know for sure, I certainly agree with you that the progress that tolerance of gay Americans—tolerance both socially and legally, I should say—the tolerance would not have happened, I dare say, without permitted hate speech, so as to expose all ideas to the light of day so they can be debated, discussed, and ultimately eliminated. So that was such an important concept, that hate speech is important to get rid of the bad thoughts. It’s the only way to do it.
And the second point you made is that while, of course, you don’t like it, any more than anyone would like hate speech, that is not the issue. Our society is not one which seeks to protect you from unpleasantness. That’s not what freedom is all about. Living in a free society is being exposed to events and circumstances that might make you uncomfortable. We do so in the name of the greater good of freedom.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, you sure put that well, Bob. It’s hard to improve on what you just said. I tell people a lot a couple of things, especially my friends in minority communities who support hate speech laws. First is that minorities are in the long term always safer in a society that protects hate speech than in a society that protects us from hate speech, because these protections will be administered by political majorities to their own ends.
I remind people: in the 1950s, the people who were targeted by speech codes against offensive and hateful speech were gay people. In 1953, the US Postmaster General censored the first openly gay intellectual magazine, which, by the way, in the issue he censored, was criticizing the Postmaster General’s censorship rules. It’s just classic. The greatest single breakthrough in gay rights history, until gay marriage came along, was in 1958 when the Supreme Court, in a two-sentence decision, overturned that government censorship and allowed gay people to speak. But remember, when we began speaking in the ’50s, it was we who were hateful. It was we who were obscene, a threat to children, a threat to society, intolerable. Those laws are used against minorities again and again. Our best bet is with our voices.
The Global Landscape of Free Expression [07:21]
Bob Zadek: And it’s interesting, I only recently did I learn—I guess I sort of knew it—is that the United States is the only country, as I said in my intro, which does not have some limitation on free speech. And surprisingly enough, we even learn that France, as well as most, perhaps all of Western Europe, has limitations on hate speech, even though France assembled a million citizens to protest the recent slaughter of the editorial board of Charlie Hebdo in the name of free speech. That was the underlying theme in France, but yet France itself jails those who speak hate speech. How cynical that is, and how hypocritical. So we are the only country that does not ban, in one form or another, hate speech. And the reason is it goes back to our founding. Free speech is just plain in our DNA.
The First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits government—not individuals, but government—from enacting any statute abridging the right of free speech. And the First Amendment, which limits the federal government, was extended to the states by the 14th Amendment. So we have in our founding document the clear statement: people can say what they want and they cannot be jailed for it. And we are the beacon in the world for such free speech. And of course, Jonathan, in Europe we know, and in Canada, there are all kinds of limitations on what you are allowed to speak. It is less free in that regard than the United States.
Jonathan Rauch: Yeah, America’s a real outlier because of the First Amendment. I think it used to be that Hungary was the one European country that did not sanction or punish hate speech—what was designated by the political authorities as hate speech. But Hungary came into the fold as well. There’s United Nations treaties to which most countries are a party that actually require nations to punish racially bigoted and discriminatory speech. And there’s now an effort in Europe to expand that to sexist speech.
So other countries do limit what they see as socially intolerable speech. It’s, by the way, not usually throwing people in jail. It’s usually civil penalties. And we’re not talking about, you know, harsh police state jackboot kinds of things. What we’re actually talking about, Bob, is a lot more bureaucratic than that. It’s human rights commissions for which, if you say something that upsets people, you’ll get dragged through an investigation. And that in itself—you might or might not be cleared—but that in itself will be a form of punishment and it’s going to chill how people speak. We’ve taken this different course in America. It is hardwired into the Constitution in the First Amendment. But the courts have been very protective of speech rights in the US. That also makes us distinct.
That said, when you say it’s in our DNA, I respectfully disagree. In my very first newspaper job 30 years ago, one of the things the managing editor used to like to say is, “If you put the First Amendment up to a plebiscite in the United States today, it would lose and lose big.” We have to get up every day, those of us who are against restrictions on hateful and offensive speech, we have to get up every day and remake this case because it’s so counterintuitive.
Bob Zadek: And it’s interesting. I would wonder if we took a poll of Americans today and offered them the choice: Would you favor limitations on free speech, hate speech, or other types of speech like that? Whether most Americans would be reluctant to give up any liberty at all in favor of protecting somebody’s sensitivities and feelings.
In America, we do have limitations on speech, but they are so narrow. The Supreme Court about 40 years ago attempted, struggled to define obscenity. And obscenity is a limitation of free speech. You’re not allowed to voice in the public forum or publish statements that are deemed to be obscene with a very hard standard to enforce. But putting aside areas like obscenity, it is very hard to find any limitations in America on the right of free speech. There are civil penalties if you slander an individual. There are penalties for lying. But not what’s called prior restraint. The government cannot say ab initio, “You cannot say it.” And that’s the difference between America and the rest of the free world.
Campus Speech Codes and Hostile Environments [13:05]
Jonathan Rauch: Now, Jonathan, there are two notable exceptions to that tendency. One is in campaign finance law, which is tangential but worth mentioning, where there are various restrictions on political expression, which the Supreme Court is busy striking down. And the second is speech codes on college campuses.
Bob Zadek: I knew you were—I was hoping you were going to bring that up, Jonathan. That’s, of course, a very big deal because since it is not the government doing the prohibiting, but rather a private institution—Brandeis University—then the universities are free to do what they want. And free speech has been severely compromised, as my regular listeners will know when we had Greg Lukianoff on the show several times from FIRE. College campuses go out of their way to prevent their students, with their tender sensitivities, from being exposed to points of view that they may find offensive. Have you had experience with the speech codes on college campuses?
Jonathan Rauch: Yeah, I’ve done a fair amount of speaking on the issue and gone to colleges. I, again, wouldn’t quite agree with your characterization that this is entirely a private problem. At places like Brandeis, we also see speech codes at public universities, which are government-funded and which are subject to the First Amendment. And as Mr. Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, I’m sure has said on your show, the courts in some cases will strike down these speech codes as unconstitutional, but that doesn’t stop the universities from having them.
There’s also a source of important government pressure on universities and employers to regulate speech in the form of what’s called the “hostile environment” doctrine, which says that if a college or an employer is creating an environment that’s seen as pervasively hostile either to workers or to students, they can’t do that. And those rules, which come with federal money and sometimes federal civil penalties attached, do pressure these institutions to adopt codes that create a “friendly environment.” Well, a friendly environment means people aren’t saying stuff that’s offensive. So you wind up with colleges in this kind of balancing act where sometimes the First Amendment gets lost in the mix.
Bob Zadek: And of course, well, employers per se are not regulated by the First Amendment because it’s not government. So what goes on in the employment area, of course, it’s looked at through a different prism. It’s looked at through the prism of all of this workplace equality, and there’s a whole different standard than would be applied to government. Our country was formed, of course, with a real concern, albeit fear, of government intruding into private behavior. So the First Amendment limits the government because that was the institution most feared, the only institution that carries guns.
Jonathan Rauch: What’s happening, Bob, with private employers is actually a lot of government pressure is being brought to bear on private employers to police the speech of their workers. So in effect, the government is requiring employers to do in the workplace what the government could not itself do: regulate speech. And there’s a body of legal thinking that says, “Wait a minute, the courts need to get active on this. They can’t let the government force employers to do what the government can’t do: regulate speech.” So this is an area that really needs attention. Telling people, for example, that employers have got to take action against a sexist employee who says something that might offend a woman in the workplace—that’s very problematic from a free speech point of view.
Bob Zadek: And that is an excellent point, how skillful government has become in appointing deputies, albeit vigilantes, to do the work of government while it’s not government per se doing the work. So government has been able to deputize large segments of the commercial community as well as the academic community to do its work and to do for the government what the government cannot do directly. It is simply a way of expanding government influence and power somewhat indirectly because the government can’t do so directly.
And it’s growing as government struggles quite naturally to get around the constitutional limitations on what it can do. And it happens all the time where the federal government will use the purse to influence state governments to things as easy as speed limit and minimum wage, which the government cannot do directly. It simply influences the federal government by dangling out dollars. And that is growing and starting to get the attention of the Supreme Court, hopefully more so. So you’re quite right that employers become, as the banks have on—as I pointed this out many times on my show—employers have become agents of the federal government to some degree, and not to the benefit of society.
The Case Study of Gay Rights [18:58]
Bob Zadek: Now, Jonathan, you mentioned—and I want to go back to this because it is so important, it is core to this discussion—how that because hate speech was permitted in the area you mentioned, in the area of gay rights, because hate speech was permitted, that enabled it to be neutralized and ultimately overcome. What was the dynamic? How did that come about?
Jonathan Rauch: The first thing that had to happen was what I mentioned earlier, which is the Supreme Court case of One, Inc. v. Olesen, which freed gay people to speak. Before that, we were censored. We were obscene. That happens in 1958. And right at the same time, a man named Frank Kameny is fired from his government job in the US Army Map Service because he’s gay. At that time, gay people could not work for the federal government. We were considered deviants and perverts. It’s not a widely known fact, but McCarthyism went after far more gay people than it did communists.
Kameny, unlike many others who had been fired, decides to fight. And the way he does that is by arguing his case. He protests his firing through the executive branch. He protested in Congress. He filed the very first lawsuit to go to the Supreme Court. The court decides not to hear him, but he wrote a brilliant brief. And over the course of three decades, Frank Kameny became a very outspoken public critic of all the bad ideas that were oppressing gay people. And lots of other people followed him into the ’60s and the ’70s.
And as they, and ultimately I and others of my generation, joined them in criticizing and ridiculing these terrible and hateful ideas—for example, gay people are recruiting children, or threatening children, or seducing children, or we’re undermining society, or there’s something wrong with our love, or we’re medically unfit, or we can’t be trusted in work for government—as we held these beliefs up to critical scrutiny, they just tumbled. It took time, but they tumbled.
And then finally comes the gay marriage movement, which is very much driven by ideas and by speech and by making what seemed initially to be a case that people just didn’t want to listen to. But you know, Bob, in America, it’s just an inspiration to me. If you give people time and you let them hear reasoned arguments, over time reason usually does prevail in this country. And that’s why public argument is so much better, I think, at distinguishing truth from hate than, for example, a speech commission on a university campus will ever be.
Respect for the Mind vs. Feelings [22:13]
Bob Zadek: And it’s really a question of greater respect for the mind than for feelings, somebody’s feelings. It’s a question—the founders had profound respect for freedom of conscience. Let the mind of man sort things out. And therefore, man must be exposed to all ideas, even those that are terribly hateful and have no redeeming value. We must be exposed to all ideas.
Jonathan Rauch: Especially offensive ideas are important. Offensive ideas are a kind of social resource because almost every important scientific, cultural, social idea began as something that deeply offended someone. And most offensive ideas are just offensive and stupid. But one in a hundred or one in a million is absolutely invaluable.
The idea, for example, that monarchy is not the proper form of government. Talk about hateful and offensive and seditious. Thank you. And the great thing is that an open conversation allows millions of minds to go to work on these offensive ideas and find the few that are the gold nuggets, the needles in the haystack, and throw the rest away. We don’t know at the beginning of the discussion which of the many offensive ideas are just stupid and which are really important. The only way to find that out is to sort them out through public criticism and inquiry. That’s how gay people got where we are. It’s how Martin Luther King got where he was. It’s through this process of public argument.
When you try to shut that down, either with government restrictions or with cultural restrictions that put taboos around whole areas of discussion, what happens is not that you put minorities or anyone else on a more secure footing. What happens is that you weaken the quest for knowledge and moral improvement. And knowledge and moral improvement is ultimately where the answer to hate comes from. Hate comes out of fear and out of ignorance, and you fight that with knowledge. That’s what Frank Kameny knew. In his career—he died as recently as 2011—in his entire career, as critical and harsh and loud and obnoxious as he could be, and I heard him do it, as far as I know, he never once called for any of his opponents to be silenced or punished for what they said.
Bob Zadek: He was better off if they spoke to expose their ideas. This is Bob Zadek. I’m spending the morning with Jonathan Rauch. We are asking the question: Is hate speech good for America?
Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show every Sunday at 9:00 AM. I’m your host, Bob Zadek. We’re the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. Today we are asking the question: Is hate speech good for America? And of course it is. Helping me sort this out is Jonathan Rauch. Jonathan has written The Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. That was written in, I believe, the late ’90s if I’m not mistaken, or early 2000s, and then recently republished. Jonathan has just written Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul that just recently published.
We are discussing hate speech in America. America is the only country in the civilized world—I sort of hate that phrase, but I’ll use it—which does not prohibit any form of hate speech. We have a very strong civic tradition of allowing all thoughts, hateful and not hateful, to be in the public marketplace for ideas. The question is: Is that a good thing? After all, it does pain people, it does hurt some people, it makes them feel bad. But we are willing to tolerate these individuals feeling bad just to get the ideas, good and bad, into the marketplace. Because after all, if hate speech is easily the target of ridicule, and once you can ridicule it, it will be eliminated. It will be chased out of the marketplace. Whereas if it doesn’t get exposed to this sunlight, it never gets challenged or ridiculed, and therefore it just continues. So in fact, the only cure for collective hateful thoughts, the only cure is to expose it to the public, expose it for the bad thinking that it is. I can’t imagine any other way to eliminate hateful thoughts, thoughts that work against civic life. There isn’t any other way other than by exposing it to the public. And it happens over and over again. And that is why, perhaps, Europe has a more difficult time in eliminating these and making progress, eliminating these hateful thoughts, rather than in the United States where we have done a much better job with gay rights and with racial tolerance, where we have made enormous progress only by exposing the hateful ideas to the public. Sorry for that long-winded introduction, Jonathan. I just had some points I wanted to make.
Jonathan Rauch: Yes, I differ with this idea of a “civilized world,” so I regret your use of that term.
Bob Zadek: I actually, having said it, I do too.
The Evolution of Obscenity Laws [25:47]
Bob Zadek: Now, the issue of hate speech and having it be permitted. I can’t imagine any other way other than by force to expose these bad ideas and to efficiently—one can argue it took too much time—but efficiently purge them from the marketplace of ideas. There’s no other way.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, the deep epistemological problem here, so to speak, is the problem of knowledge. It’s that you never know in advance who’s going to turn out to be right and who’s going to turn out to be wrong. The only way to find out is to hold these views up to the public light. There were many reputable people in America—in fact, I would hasten to say most reputable people in America—believed in my lifetime that homosexuality was mental illness. Now, this was not hate speech by Fred Phelps, the notorious anti-gay campaigner. This was mainstream American psychiatry. It did tremendous damage to gay people in America. It stigmatized us. It sent us into various forms of harsh and ineffective therapy. As anyone knows who’s seen the new movie about Alan Turing, the great British computer scientist, he was actually condemned by law to chemical castration for being gay. I mean, this went on all the time.
But the reason I’m making this point is that that idea—that to be gay was to be sick in a dangerous way—was not grounded in any real science. It was grounded in centuries of hatred of homosexuality. And the only way to get at it was to expose it. And that was done, for example, by Frank Kameny, who I mentioned, who in 1972 got on the podium at the conference of the American Psychiatric Association and denounced those people to their face for genocide, he called it. He called it a campaign of extermination against homosexual Americans. It was that ability to express ourselves strongly in the face of hate that exposed this science as pseudoscience. But the point is, no one would have said in 1960, “Well, this is hate speech, let’s ban it,” because it’s what everyone believed. And that’s the real threat. Not the stuff that the few oddballs and nutcases say that offends us, but the much larger beliefs that turn out to be false. We need offensive speech as a way to find the truth and get rid of these bad ideas.
Bob Zadek: Jonathan, the intellectually difficult challenge that I have for myself is we have accepted and we permit government to ban obscenity as having no—and I think the phrase was “redeeming social value.” How would one—could one distinguish or could one argue that for the same reasons that we allow and we should allow hate speech, we should not ban obscene speech? Or is there a way to distinguish the need for hate speech in America and not the need for obscene speech?
Jonathan Rauch: I am not an expert on obscenity law, but my understanding is that it’s mostly fallen into desuetude. Obscenity law goes back a long time in the US, but it’s been so narrowed by the courts that you just virtually never hear about obscenity cases anymore. This is why the courts have been so important. It’s not just what’s written in the Constitution in the First Amendment. It’s what the courts have to say about it. And a lot of my libertarian friends complain about government getting ever bigger and more intrusive, and in some areas there may be truth to that. But I constantly point out to them, Bob, how fortunate we are that this country has been over more than 200 years steadily more protective of freedom of speech. And obscenity law is a good example of that. The courts have become better and better over time at not allowing government to intrude on this core liberty. I would remind you that in the 1920s, arguably the greatest literary masterpiece of the English language in the 20th century, Ulysses by James Joyce, was banned from the United States by the government as obscene. You could do that in the lifetime of some people who are living today. You can’t anymore. And that’s the good news. America has really done, I think, quite well on this issue on the whole.
The Majority’s Impulse to Regulate [31:59]
Bob Zadek: On the issue of the college campuses, I think it’s fair to say that the limitation on open debate on free speech is led more by—it seems to be led more by progressives. And progressives seem to be in the forefront, people on the left, if you will. What is there about progressive thinking that produces that—what strikes me as being unprogressive attitude? I don’t understand how progressives have come to be so active in limiting—George Will was banned from a college campus recently. George Will is no radical. And others like it. So what is there about the progressive movement that allows them amongst themselves to be actively limiting free speech?
Jonathan Rauch: Well, if you’ll allow me, I’ll rephrase the question because to me it’s not a question of what is it about progressives that lends itself to this desire to regulate speech. It’s: What is it about majorities that creates this desire? I would argue that in most societies and cultures where you see a dominant majority with a dominant point of view, you will often see that majority try to use the instruments of law and culture to repress the alternatives, both for political gain because they don’t like political rivals, and out of a well-intentioned belief that, “You know, we’ve got it right and the safety and security of society depend on having these ideas in place.”
Well, in American universities at the moment, for reasons we could talk about, it so happens that there’s a left-of-center consensus. And when you get really broad consensus on some issues as race, gender, class, and stuff like that on a lot of campuses, you get situations where majorities start to think, “Well, how could a decent person even think differently than I do? I mean, how could someone possibly disagree with us? We all think this, right?” So then it’s the next logical step to say, “Well, if you don’t think this, you must be some kind of monster or freak, and we can’t allow this and we have to take a stand against it.” But I think that’s a function of the predominant majority view. I think in cultures around the world where you don’t have a First Amendment, where you have, for example, a deeply conservative religious consensus—and we can all think of countries where this comes to mind—you’ll see blasphemy laws, for example, which are in very common use and usually, by the way, to oppress dissidents and minorities. You’ll see all kinds of measures to restrict speech.
So I think what we’re actually fighting here, Bob, is the natural human tendency for majorities to try to lash out against those that question their conventional wisdom. And that goes back to the point that you and I have been discussing pretty much this entire hour, which is free speech is minorities’ best friend because free speech allows us to puncture, to have our say in the face of these overwhelming majoritarian onslaughts.
Bob Zadek: I think you made a very important point in when you draw our attention to the majority suppressing the minority. After all, the majority has what they want. They’re in the majority. There is nothing for them to gain other than the abstract principle of liberty, but there’s nothing for them to gain by allowing other thoughts to enter the marketplace other than a diminution of their own power. So I think you’re quite right. It is a majority-minority view.
Salman Rushdie and the “But” in Free Speech [38:03]
Bob Zadek: Now, I know that Salman Rushdie was important to you in your writings and you have often mentioned him. He has been very active in what has been going on in France recently. France has been ground zero for the discussion of hate speech, for on the one hand we had the recent slaughter by the terrorists of the editorial board of Charlie Hebdo. And Salman Rushdie has spoken out in favor of or in support of the importance of all points of view. Now, Jonathan, we have a clip of Salman Rushdie who recently spoke. Raymond, could we play the clip?
Salman Rushdie (Clip): In fact, there are five people in jail as we speak. No, that’s the other—that’s Judge Napolitano. Sorry. It attacked every kind of human being because what? It was making fun. Its strategy was to make fun of people. And it was seen as that. It was seen as that, and it was very loved. These cartoonists were beloved in France. And now the moment somebody says, “Yes, I believe in free speech, but,” I stop listening. You know, “I believe in free speech, but people should behave themselves.” “I believe in free speech, but we shouldn’t upset anybody.” “I believe in free speech, but let’s not go too far.” The point about it is the moment you limit free speech, it’s not free speech. The point about it is that it’s free.
Bob Zadek: That was Salman Rushdie speaking in Paris recently. One of the points of his commentary was that in France, as I mentioned earlier, France actually jails individuals who speak what the French government considers to be hate speech. And of course the issue is what the French government considers to be hate speech. So we have in France, we have government, which is after all a very small number of humans, deciding what the majority of humans can allow or can get into their brain. And that is the scary part of hate speech legislation. It is the government limiting what gets into your brain. And it really tells the population: the government says, “We do not trust you to use and to sort out the good ideas from the bad ideas, so we will do it for you by limiting your exposure to the ideas in the first instance.” Hate speech laws, in my view, express a profound distrust by the government of the wisdom of the people to sort out the good from the bad. We should be allowed to make that decision for ourselves and not have government do it for us. And hate speech laws replace our brain with the government’s. And Jonathan, what you said earlier is the only way to have these hate speech eliminated is to let the people hear it and sort it out. It’s basically a faith in the people to do the right thing and reach the right conclusions.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, the real goal here is not to eliminate hate speech, it’s to eliminate hate, right? And of course we never eliminate hate, but we reduce it. And the way we reduce it is by exposing it to the light of truth. Hate comes from ignorance. It comes from fear, and knowledge is the enemy of those things. And I can tell you as a 54-year-old gay American who grew up in a very different world, that the power of our speech has transformed this country morally from a place of hate to a place of something that I would call respect and coming to be, in fact, love.
And that’s the wonderful thing about hate speech. In the long term, it’s its own cure. If we don’t let the process unfold of exposing ignorance and fear and bigotry and hate to criticism, which is a process which of course reveals those things to the public—that’s what exposing means—if we don’t expose them and criticize them, then we may in some cases suppress some speakers from so-called hate speech. But in the process, we’ll make the more marginal ones famous because they’ll all have their day in court and they’ll be able to be public martyrs. And we’ll suppress the process that gets rid of the hate. I often try to tell people that dealing with hatred by regulating hate speech is like dealing with global warming by breaking your thermometer.
Hate Crimes vs. Hate Speech [43:19]
Bob Zadek: You know, Jonathan, when the subject of hate speech invites—it’ll have to be a brief discussion, we’ll be running out of time shortly—the related concept of hate crimes. We have a concept of hate crimes in America, which provides for when a crime is committed, there is an enhanced penalty if the crime is proven to be driven by hatred. We had some recent cases recently, often involving gays. There was the—was it the Shepard case? I think in Texas or in Colorado, one of those Western states, where there was clearly a hate crime. And the question is: Should there be, again, an enhanced penalty? Does it make good sense to have enhanced penalties for hate crimes? Is that the way to eliminate hatred? And isn’t that intruding into the mind of the criminal and penalizing him for his thoughts?
Jonathan Rauch: Hate crimes laws are, in my opinion, not a very good idea. But I’m much less worried about them than I am hate speech laws because in hate crimes laws, in every case, what you’re doing is enhancing or differentiating the penalties for things that are already illegal anyway. And so they’re operating very much on the margins. In my opinion, the main reason I’m against them, actually, is I think in practice they have not had a big effect on speech and debate. You wouldn’t expect them to have much effect because what they’re applying to is a situation where someone’s being, for example, assaulted and battered. But I think they’re bad crime policy because when you say that a crime is worse if it’s motivated by hate, then you’re also saying that a crime is not as bad if it’s not motivated by hate. And I think it’s just better crime policy to say, “No, crime is bad.”
But no, I don’t worry about it in the same way that I do directly criminalizing speech itself. Nor, by the way, we ought to mention, Bob, again, I caution my libertarian friends: they spend an awful lot of time worrying about things the government is doing, and sometimes not enough worrying about things the government is not doing or things going on outside of government. The biggest, arguably, the biggest attack on freedom of speech and thought in Europe today is not coming from hate speech laws by the government. It’s coming from self-censorship from a lot of people who are very worried about being the victims of crime or terrorism if they, for example, say things that Muslims might find offensive or that other groups might find offensive. They’ll find themselves at the end of social campaigns, often peaceful. Now and then they’ll find themselves stabbed to death. Flemming Rose, who was the editor in Denmark who published the famous Muhammad cartoons a few years ago, has a wonderful new book about the extent to which artists and writers and journalists in Europe are self-censoring themselves now. He’s very worried about it. And government has such an important role to play there in standing up for free speech, in defending these people who do this, who engage in free speech, as does society. It warmed my heart to see French society rise up almost as one in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, with millions of people lining up to buy the next issue. That sends a wonderful cultural message that by God, we will not be intimidated. And that’s just very important.
Self-Censorship and the Heckler’s Veto [48:19]
Bob Zadek: CNN was recently publicly criticized by many public speakers and other networks because they refused to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. They defended their behavior—it was again, as you mentioned, self-censorship—they defended their behavior because they said, “We have a duty to protect our employees and protect our physical plant from any kind of violence.” And basically they just—they, as did I think CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Company, did the same thing. They were doing so on the guise of protecting their employees, and maybe they sincerely believed it, they probably did. But there was another example of self-censorship. It was known to some degree as a form of what’s called the “Heckler’s Veto.” If hecklers in the audience are able to shout down a speaker, then the speaker doesn’t get heard and the heckler wins. And I equate this self-censorship to a form of Heckler’s Veto where the heckler is a terrorist rather than somebody shouting in the audience.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, of course terrorism and the threat of violence goes well beyond heckling. And my heart—I’m a professional journalist, and my heart goes out to, for example, the New York Times and Dean Baquet, the editor there, who the Times declined to publish any of the Charlie Hebdo images. I agree with those who are critical of that decision. I think the news value of publishing those is extremely high, and I think the more places that do publish them, the less the risk is for any particular one. There’s safety in numbers. As a journalist, my heart does go out to people who make that decision because it is true, it is a fact of life, that when you publish a Muhammad cartoon, you do expose yourself and your employees to a certain amount of risk. And this is a hard call to make. That’s one reason, though, I am so proud of the people of France and so proud of the many publications that did step up and reproduce the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. And why I think culturally we’re starting to see some stiffening of the spines. I like that.
Bob Zadek: I think in what happened with Charlie Hebdo, there’s lots of reason to be encouraged and to be optimistic about the future. I think, as I think you do, this fear of publishing information because of terrorist reprisals, while it’s rational, it’s rational, and it’s—we always make a balancing between, as Benjamin Franklin said, there’s always a balancing between safety and liberty. We are always called upon to make that decision. And sometimes we get it right and sometimes we don’t. And the decision not to publish is the balancing, is the giving up a little liberty for a little short-term security. Benjamin Franklin observed that.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, that’s right. My feeling about this is it’s not my place to condemn someone for not stepping up to publish in an arguably risky situation, but that the better way to do it is to praise the heroism of those who do step up. And there are many, many, many of those people.
Bob Zadek: As what happened in France recently. You’re exactly right. Jonathan, thank you so much for spending an hour with us on this Sunday morning. How could my audience follow your writing?
Jonathan Rauch: www.jonathanrauch.com.
Bob Zadek: And your new book has been just published?
Jonathan Rauch: No, I’m working on a new book, but I would urge everyone to go buy and read The Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought in a new edition with a new afterword by me, a new foreword by George Will, and yours. I hope you like it.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, Jonathan. Have a good Sunday.
Jonathan Rauch: You too, thanks.