Censorship politics are always one-directional
Bryan W. Van Norden, a philosophy professor at Vassar College, is not impressed with free speech. More specifically he does not believe that “invincibly ignorant” people should be given a platform to speak in newspapers, on television or at universities. By way of example he cites Ann Coutler, Jordan Peterson, Kirk Cameron, Charles Murray, Roseanne, Donald Trump. Notice a pattern here? Van Norden implies that these individuals, and presumably others like them, are not “worth taking seriously as thinkers;” he argues that “Access to the general public, granted by institutions like television networks, newspapers, magazines, and university lectures, is a finite resource. institutional access should be apportioned based on merit and on what benefits the community as a whole.” By this he means that media outlets and higher education should more or less bar people like this from being able to speak.
It has become increasingly popular for the Left to attempt to delegitimize its opponents rather than engage their ideas altogether. The ruse is transparent: The fervent insistence of people like Van Norden aside, these individuals do have ideas, and many of them are interesting and thought-provoking. Jordan Peterson is a deeply compelling voice in modern higher education; there is a reason he draws such large crowds and creates such controversy, and it is not because he is “invincibly ignorant.” Charles Murray, too, is a learned and highly intelligent political scientist, a man whose own work is simply not the hysterically cartoonish devil-worship that progressives make it out to be. Ann Coulter may say some inflammatory things, and reasonable people can criticize her for them…but what of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer whom Van Norden favorably cites and who once described the heroic first responders of the September 11th terrorist attacks as “not human?”
Liberals very often say deeply stupid and hateful things. Is it not a bit suspicious that a professor could not cite even one progressive whom he would like to see shut out from polite society?
There is a reason for this notable absence: Anti-free-speech ideology almost always only works in one direction. Everyone likes speech with which they agrees; everyone dislikes speech that they finds offensive or irritating or hateful. Many of us, of course, are willing to grit our teeth and move on with our days and tolerate speech we thing is wrong or stupid. Some of us, however, prefer to shut up those with whom they disagree.
For now, thankfully, we have a robust free speech culture in this country; our “institutions” are generally more than willing to listen to a diverse and wide-ranging set of opinions. But it might not always be that way—not if the Bryan Van Nordens of the world get their way. A country in which we systematically scrub the discourse of all offensive or controversial speech would be boring, staid, broken and useless. Let’s avoid it if we can.
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