Kindly Inquisitors’ and How We All Lose

the ‘Offendedness Sweepstakes’

 11/01/2013 12:58 pm ET | Updated Jan 23, 2014
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 Greg LukianoffPresident and CEO, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of a modern classic
explaining the importance of free speech in society.

In Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attack on Free Thought, Brookings Institution

scholar and journalist Jonathan Rauch provides a spirited and elegant
defense of the special role free speech and free inquiry play as part of the
most successful intellectual system in human history. I cannot do justice to the
fullness and persuasiveness of Rauch’s argument in a summary, but my
friend Daniel Shuchman does an impressive job in this recent article about
Rauch’s book forForbes. I urge you to buy the 20th anniversary edition
of  Kindly Inquisitors, which was released earlier this month.

Rauch is a pretty amazing individual, and I have written about him several

times over the years. His causes and interests are tremendously broad. He
was an early and passionate advocate for marriage equality and for gay rights
in general and has written extensively on topics as varied as reform of
democratic institutions and how to respect and care for introverts.

Rauch was inspired to write a philosophical, rather than legalistic, defense of

freedom of speech after what he saw as the West’s lackluster defense of
freedom of speech in the face of the 1989 fatwa against author Salman
Rushdie for his bookThe Satanic Verses. He worried that the half-hearted
defense was part of an overall trend among Western nations, and particularly
among academics, to undermine, underestimate and, frankly, misrepresent
the essentiality of freedom of speech to the discovery of truth. He illustrated
how even well-meaning restrictions on what people should or should not be
allowed to say fundamentally short-circuit our truth-seeking process, resulting
in thinner ideas and unwarranted certainty on unexplored topics.

Of the many side effects of this retreat from free speech that Rauch predicted
20 years ago, one was that if we privilege feelings over free speech and allow
claims of offense to slow or stop meaningful discussion, people will naturally
abuse this ultimate trump card. In the end, the societal bar for what is
“offensive” will simply get lower and lower. This “offendedness sweepstakes,”
as Rauch has called it, does not take long to produce terrible or, often, absurd
results.

I relied heavily on Kindly Inquisitors for my own book, Unlearning Liberty:

Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate. Unlearning Liberty is
about my work defending free speech on college campuses, where the forces
of common sense have been losing the offendedness sweepstakes for a long
time. For some surprising examples of what can get you in trouble on the
modern college campus, check out this post I cheekily named “Censored: Top
Ten Pics Too Hot for Campus.” (Prepare not to be titillated.)

The “right not to be offended” culture is not just causing problems in America,
either. Take for example the recent decision by six student unions in the
United Kingdom to ban the Robin Thicke song “Blurred Lines” on the basis
that the pop song of the summer is sexist and promotes “rape culture.” I spoke
to a reporter at length about how the rationale for, and the targets of, this
censorship eerily resemble those found on both sides of the Atlantic during
the Victorian era. I must note that I did not draw this comparison lightly. If you
study censorship during the Victorian era, the idea that sexually suggestive
lyrics and music should be banned because they might lead the savage
masses towards violence, and specifically violence towards women, was
extremely common, and, frankly, often used against foreigners and minorities.

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Rauch at the Museum of
Sex in New York City to talk about his book. He asked me if I thought things
were getting worse. He pointed out that in the ‘80s and early ‘90s numerous
academics and intellectuals were making broad, sweeping claims about the
need to punish wide swaths of hateful or hurtful speech. But recently, he
argued, arguments for censorship seem to be relying on narrower, more
limited rationales, like those put forth by New York University law professor
Jeremy Waldron.

While I don’t necessarily believe Rauch is wrong, I am less sanguine about

this trend, if it exists. If the arguments for censorship are getting narrower, I
suspect two of the reasons are that A) broader rationales for censorship rarely
win in court because of the powerful protections of the First Amendment and
B) the unrelenting crusade to limit “offensive” speech has actually been quite
effective, especially on campus.

Whether it is academics rushing to dismiss America’s reverence for free

speech in the face of the Benghazi attacks, or National Public Radio’s firing of
Juan Williams (which is discussed at length in this new video), offending
people can be a fatal sin in America today, and our skin seems substantially
thinner than it was a generation ago.

The greatest impact of the pro-censorship wave of the ‘80s and ‘90s is that, to
a degree, it undermined the moral force and mass appeal that free speech
enjoyed in the ‘60s and ‘70s. 
Once you focus people on the one instance in which free speech rights
produce results they dislike, and draw attention away from the almost endless
ways that they benefit from free inquiry, it is easy for people to start taking
their rights for granted. This concern is more than just conjectural, too: The
latest survey (PDF) from the First Amendment Center found that 47 percent of
18-30 year olds believe the First Amendment goes too far, one of the worst
results in the history of the survey.

I have seen this effect throughout the course of my career. When I started
defending student speech at the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education back in 2001, defenders of campus censorship often cited high-
minded and enlightened-sounding justifications related to tolerance or
diversity in order to do battle with decades of high-minded and philosophical
campus rhetoric that defended free speech. But over time, it seems as though
some of the habits of the censor have simply slipped into the bloodstream and
claims of “free speech” by themselves have lost some persuasive power. In
academia, even comparatively trivial concerns sometimes supercede the
fundamental human right of freedom of speech.

As a result of these pro-censorship arguments being repeated over time, a

culture of self-sustaining but mindless bureaucratic censorship has taken root
and is producing sometimes shocking results. Take, for example, the student
last fall who was severely punished for mildly suggesting it might be possible
to say something less than flattering about his college’s hockey coach. Or the
more recent absurdity in which a student was ordered to stop handing out
Constitutions on Constitution Day and was told that he needed to get advance
state permission in order to use a tiny concrete “free speech zone.”

It’s all very predictable to those of us who study the history of free speech: A
censorship movement starts with the lofty promise to rid the world of some
social evil but then degenerates into an excuse to simply silence critics (or
pop songs you dislike). Or, as it went in the context of higher education, what
was once “We want to make campuses as comfortable as possible for
vulnerable populations so we’re going to censor hurtful words” has devolved
into “Okay, I don’t know, just don’t make fun of my parking garage project.”

The good news is that this is one serious societal problem that does in fact
have a solution. That solution is to teach students that freedom of speech is
not only a philosophically beautiful and compelling idea but, as Rauch argues,
also one that is uniquely effective at discarding bad ideas, getting us to better
ones, and promoting science, art, innovation, and creativity.

People should learn from our history that censorship is the ally of power. That
free speech is the friend of the marginalized, dismissed and disempowered.
And that, perhaps, free speech’s greatest gift is its power to simply let us
know the truth about the world we live in, rather than the world that those in
charge wish it to be.

For all these reasons, and so many more, Kindly Inquisitors may be more

important than ever.

Follow Greg Lukianoff on Twitter: www.twitter.com/glukianoff