Teresa Bejan is an author and an associate professor of political science at Oxford University. Today Prof. Bejan wrote a really interesting Twitter thread on the nature of free speech and how some of the people who deny the existence of cancel culture seem to be missing the point. I think the key point here is that the opposite of free speech it’s just silence but “unfree” speech which is socially compelled. It’s not enough to have the legal right to speak if you fear for your job or your safety for doing so.
1/ It’s also worth asking today: what exactly makes speech “free”?
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) July 16, 2020
3/ Parrhesiastic speech is thus ‘free’ in the sense of being freely or frankly spoken, without fear or favor towards one’s audience and how they might react.
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) July 16, 2020
5/ So in order to enjoy “free speech“, one needs not only to enjoy the legal right to speak and its material conditions (a voice, a platform, an audience). One also needs to be able to *trust* one’s audience to be tolerant when it comes to things they don’t want to hear.
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) July 16, 2020
7/ The old idea that free speech in the sense of parrhesia therefore requires extraordinary courage is captured in Foucault’s phrase “fearless speech,” and the Quaker dictum, “speaking truth to power.”
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) July 16, 2020
9/ Well, one thing he meant is that parrhesia should be made much, much less dangerous. And the danger Mill feared most did NOT come from the state.
The legal right alone does not make speech “free.”
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) July 16, 2020
11/ That punishment didn’t come in the form of a muzzle or a jail cell. Rather, it came in the form of economic and social sanctions. Calls for the speaker to be fired, say, or investigated by their employer; demands that they should be socially shunned or harassed.
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) July 16, 2020
By this point, what Bejan is describing should sound pretty relevant and familiar.
13/ Mill was wrong about a lot, but he was right about this: the legal right to free speech is insufficient to protect parrhesia, and parrhesia is valuable. We must therefore cultivate a culture that tolerates disagreeable speech.
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) July 16, 2020
15/ Which brings me to the latest fracas: @bariweiss, @jk_rowling, etc. are not wrong to complain that their free speech is being infringed.
They’re talking about parrhesia…and they’re right!
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) July 16, 2020
17/ Nor does it mean that they are free from the threat of economic or social sanctions (including sexist abuse) when they don’t.
Those sanctions are, indeed, the product of other people’s “free and frank” speech.
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) July 16, 2020
Rowling hasn’t been cancelled (yet) but that’s only because of where she started, i.e. a very wealthy author beloved around the world. Any lesser person making similar statements would have been destroyed by now.
And this is really the core of Bejan’s take. People have the right to disagree vocally with Rowling or decide not to buy her books in future. However, cancel culture goes beyond those kinds of individual decisions and attempts to creates a campaign designed to shame and punish people by as large a group as can be assembled online. The goal isn’t an exchange of ideas. The goal is to make someone pay as heavy a price as possible for their stated views. And as Bejan suggests, that can include all kinds of social abuse which is one reason Twitter can be a particularly ugly place for outspoken women online.
19/ Just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s right.
Rowling, Weiss, et al., are therefore reasonable to fear that they can no longer speak their minds *freely* or *frankly* without suffering abuse.
Women, especially, are often under social pressure to be “agreeable.”
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) July 16, 2020
The impact of this behavior isn’t just on the targets it’s also on everyone else who is watching the public spectacle. This is how you create the socially conditioned world of unfree speech she described earlier. You teach people they need to self-censor or else.
19/ If they feel that way, imagine how people with much less fame, education, job security, etc. feel.
Imagine how young people feel, who are trying to work out what it is they think in the first place and often learn best by thinking aloud.
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) July 16, 2020
21/ But my sense is that much of the critical response to complaints about “cancel culture” is missing the point about “free speech” as parrhesia, or speaking freely.
— Teresa M. Bejan (@tmbejan) July 16, 2020
I don’t want to put words in her mouth but my take on her view is this: Anyone claiming that free speech can’t be threatened unless actual government censorship is involved is sidestepping the issue. So is anyone claiming that free speech hasn’t been threatened so long as Rowling, Weiss, etc. are still free to speak.
The existence of the First Amendment is not enough to create a culture of free speech. That depends on the commitment of millions of people to accept the idea that there is social value even in disagreeable speech. That’s a point that many conservative speakers have been trying to make by showing up at progressive college campuses. But unfortunately it’s an idea that far-left protesters and some significant portion of the journalists at the New York Times no longer really believe.
If you’re interested in hearing more from Bejan, she has a book out called Mere Civility.
