The Right to Free Speech is the "Queering" of Speech
Fighting for your right to free speech does not weaken the system in your favor. No, it actually strengthens the system by giving validity to the logic of the system itself.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Free speech seems like one of those issues that is so obvious, it barely needs to be argued or defended. No one should restrict my speech. The United States of America is built around the idea of open and free discussion. The free exchange of ideas. The marketplace of ideas. How can the best ideas emerge if we restrict people’s ability to speak openly and without hinderance. In the last few years, especially around the issue of Covid-19, its severity, its spread, and how we as a society should respond, people’s reaction has been one of trying to gather as much information as possible, to understand fully what is happening. The news seems increasingly politicized. Can it be trusted to give us accurate information? The government has started to label those that differ from official pronouncements as spreaders of “disinformation.” The state has worked behind the scenes with media and social media platforms to shut down dissenting voices. It seems like now, more than any other, is a time to fight for the free speech maximalist position. This is a bedrock “conservative” position, we are told.
Part of the problem we have in coming to grips with the idea of speech is that liberalism, and with it liberal ideas, are so ubiquitous, so ingrained into our culture, that we are like fish in water who don’t even know we are wet.
“You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”
For many of us we live in the Matrix, and the all encompassing system which traps us and keeps our minds imprisoned is liberalism. Most of us think we are fighting for “conservative” values when we are fighting for free speech rights. The truth is, when we do so, we are actually fighting to preserve “the system.” The fight for free speech is a battle for liberalism. Part of what we do here is offer you the red pill: the opportunity to learn the truth of the cultural system within which we live and breathe.
We have become so used to the idea of free speech as an unmitigated good that we struggle making the connection between the idea of the freedom of speech and the cultural degradation we experience in our society. Especially in an era when the government is making efforts to restrict speech and stamp out voices which undermine or contradict “official” messaging, now would seem like the time, more than ever, to emphasize the citizen’s right to speak freely.
So what is the problem with the idea of free speech? It is the problem of limits. Should there be limits placed upon speech? Are there things which shouldn’t be said? The idea that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech” very quickly runs into problems. There are the old examples of running into a crowded theater and yelling, “Fire!” Should you be allowed to falsely slander someone’s reputation? Should you be allowed to libel someone? Should you be allowed to incite a crowd to violence? All of these are abridgements upon your ability to speak freely. So, obviously, there are limits to speech. The first amendment was problematic from the very beginning. How do we negotiate and establish proper boundaries for speech in a system which specifically says that no law shall be made to abrogate free speech?
All law is an expression of morality, of an operative moral framework. Where does that moral framework come from? In the period following the Protestant Reformation, a series of wars mixing religion and politics, raged across Europe right up to the beginning of the 1700’s. In the Enlightenment, there was a real hope that by establishing a new type of public space, one based upon reason and the free exchange of ideas, that conflicts flowing out of religious passion could be avoided going forward. The Christian faith was pushed into the private realm as source for personal satisfaction and meaning. But in the public civic spaces, a new way of doing things based upon reason, open discussion and a social contract would be instituted. In some ways, our public spaces would be negotiated like a business dealing, wherein we would all agree to conduct ourselves a certain way in the public realm. The social contract. Around free speech, we would all agree that, by means of a publicly negotiated social contract, that every person would be able to speak freely without infringement.
But this idea of free speech really didn’t stand on its own. Even though there was a great optimism about the ability of reason to be a new foundation for public morality —all law is a form of and expression of morality— it relied upon a functioning morality to be operative in the background.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Why are these truths self-evident? The argumentation is not made for them. They were just assumed a priori to be true. They are an odd mix of ideas, of Enlightenment thinking with an underlying Christian morality. As John Adams said,
“Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
We don’t often think through the implications of this. In the public realm, the speech of private citizens was not to be infringed upon by the government. The free exchange of ideas was vital for the proper functioning of the marketplace of ideas. The public realm was pictured as a place where free and open debates would rage. Through the process of debate, the best ideas would be seen as best and could then be adopted by the people.
Morality —which is the foundation of law— is about establishing boundaries, setting limits on behavior and conduct, including speech. As Adams acknowledges, this system of rights and freedoms in the public realm can only operate properly when people regulate themselves and their own speech. This self-discipline was seen as being fostered through religion and morality in the private realm. The private sphere did all the moral heaving lifting, so that in the public realm there could be free debate. But speech was not really free. It was being governed by a moral system cultivated within the churches and in a culture that was still predominantly Christian. The interesting thing is, because everyone conducted themselves in a manner restrained by private morality, the public debates could be quite robust. You could actually speak more freely because everyone implicitly understood what could and could not be said. The rules, the fences, the guardrails, were established by a Christian culture. The big thing, though, for those putting in place this new system based on reason and discussion, is that “the church” as an institution, as a public power, would not be permitted to establish these rules formally, putting them into laws operative in the public realm. You could freely, publicly and openly disagree with official church teaching, doctrine and morality.
Contained within this idea of “rights” and “freedoms” is the idea of “breaking down barriers.” It began within the academic community, that there should not be limits or barriers on what knowledge we should be pursuing. We should pursue the truth regardless of how it would challenge existing orthodoxies. This idea gradually expands outwards as an operating principle of liberalism and is foundational to the notion of human progress. It is an essential part of scientific discovery and the introduction of new technologies. It is also foundational to the market economy. A major aspect of the idea of human progress is about pushing the boundaries which hold people back and make them less free. Whether it is in academic and scientific learning, or the barriers that prevent, say, women or specific ethnic, racial or social group from realizing their full potential —however that is understood— these barriers are seen as a bad thing, as an enemy of progress.
The problem is that this understanding of “rights” and “freedoms” as the breaking down of barriers or the overcoming of limits is that all operative morality is all about the setting of limits. What are the boundaries and who sets them? At one time, in the West, the Church formally set those limits, backed up by a general cultural Christianity and the power of state violence. But in the enlightenment and through the disestablishment of the church, this formal role of a limit setting morality was pushed into the private realm. This sets up a tension between the public and the private spheres. As long as Christianity remained strong in the private realm, nurturing and dictating the culture, Christian morality would be operative in setting the limits upon the public expression of people’s rights and freedoms. But if that influence waned, this notion of the breaking down of barriers would come to dominate. In reality, it was in part because of this need within liberalism to break down barriers and limits —not establish them— that the dominant Christian private culture was slowly, some would say intentionally, undermined, especially once the technological society encouraged through liberalism began to gain its full strength through industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Thus, by the middle of the 20th century it was possible for a man like Larry Flynt to successfully defend his pornographic magazine, Hustler, against accusations that he violated obscenity laws. The fact that such laws were on the books was a direct result of the influence of Christian morality in society. Obscenity laws were a clear limit upon expression and speech. But these limits did not arise from the internal logic of the Constitution itself. They came from the culture. The challenges to these Christian moral limits residing in the culture come from the logic of the idea of unabrogated rights and freedoms. When you make the argument that Congress shall not abridge your freedom of speech, you are not making an argument for limits to speech. You are making an argument that there should be no limits on speech. If the cultural approbations against pornography are waning, there in nothing in the logic of the First Amendment that would forbid pornography.
This is where you end up with convoluted arguments that “conservatism” means defending the rights of people to hold “drag queen story hour” in a public space. If “conservative” means holding up and preserving the Constitution and its various amendments as sacrosanct, you also must defend the right and the ability of people to speak without limit or barriers, regardless of how immoral or dangerous that speech is to children, for example. You must defend the rights of pornographers to make and disseminate pornography. Because the internal logic of unabridged free speech means forbidding any barriers or limits to speech, you, as a so-called “conservative” find yourself in the position of having to defend “drag queen story hour” on the basis of defending the system itself.
The sexual revolution is built upon challenging the barriers and limits of traditional —Christian— sexual morality. It uses this logic built into the idea of unabridged rights and freedoms to break down step-by-step the operative Christian morality in society. The sexual revolution, and this underlying anti-morality —for that is what it is— was able to gain traction through the twin movements of women’s suffrage and the civil rights era. This logic of the breaking down of barriers, of limits, which were seen as holding back the self-fulfillment of women and blacks, and the bureaucracy which grew up around it, were used to weaponize this idea of the breaking down barriers, directing it against Christian morality in the private sphere. But as the power of Christian morality waned in the private sphere, in large part because people embraced the idea greater freedom of choice and expression over and against the moral restrictions of their communities, it meant that the state would now increasingly fill the morality creating role. The state filled the vacuum created as Christianity receded. Because the power to establish moral boundaries is foundational to all law, it is in the interest of the state and its own power to continue to undermine the moral power of Christianity through the sexual revolution, while at the same time establishing greater restrictions on the people’s ability to counter message the state.
But this places you in a conundrum. How do you protect your ability to speak freely in the public political realm? How do you maintain your right to free speech? You can’t. Not without supporting the underlying logic of the same system that supports the gender fluidity among children, that is the breaking down of the gender barriers between the sexes. Free speech absolutism and the breaking down of the barriers between a man and woman, the queering of sex and gender, essentially operate on the same ideological framework, the same understanding of the world, that is, a world without barriers, without limits. One aspect of this ideology wishes to remove the barriers that limit speech. The other facets of this ideology wish to remove the barriers that limit sexuality and sexual expression. One is the queering of sexuality. The other is the queering of speech. All love is love. All speech is speech. A world without barriers. A world without limits.
In our society, this argument is made even by so-called “conservatives.” The only limit they perceive is for children. Adults should be free to live in a world without limits, in speech or in sexuality. What people do in private is their own business. But we should spare children from being exposed to such things. But why? Why should children be spared? There is no logic in the idea of “rights” and “freedoms” that they should be denied to children. And that argument is made, that withholding these things from children is a form of oppression. Children should go see “pride” parades. Children should be exposed to all these ideas and they can then make up their own minds. There should be no limit to the marketplace of ideas. If you as a parent wish to restrict your child’s exposure to these ideas, your private morality is considered oppressive.
So why this long diversion into the sexual revolution when we are talking about how our free speech rights were being infringed upon by the state during the government’s Covid-19 response? In large part, if you fight for your constitutional right for unlimited freedom of speech, you are inadvertently fighting to maintain the same system that wishes to remove all barriers to sexuality and gender. You might be ok with that, but know, that this position is not “conservative.” It is a liberal position that works to support and maintain the current system as it is. By fighting for your rights and freedoms in regards to speech, you are working to strengthen the internal operating logic of the system itself. A large part of “progress” involves the breaking down of limits placed upon morality by the Christian faith in the private realm. Fighting for your rights, even second amendment rights, means accepting and validating liberalism as the operative and dominant ideological system within our society. You are playing liberalism’s game by the rules set by liberalism. Even in trying to defend liberalism in its infancy, the logic of the system is still there. It just has not been fully realized yet.
On its own, liberalism cannot provide a moral framework. It requires a dominant operative cultural morality to set the rules in the private realm that then dictate behavior in the public realm. But while requiring that operative moral framework, it at the same time works to undermine it. Once liberalism has succeeded in undermining this cultural morality through its logic of breaking down barriers, it then takes the power that used to be operative in the culture into itself, fulling the role that church once filled in the public realm. This does result in the betrayal of the ideals of the liberal revolution. But you cannot merely get rid of the state and return to the original revolutionary and constitutional situation, because to do so you would require the same cultural situation as well. You would need a predominantly Christian, pre-industrial, largely agrarian society. That society no longer exists.
So where does this leave us? There are least two realities that we need to grapple with, likely more. The first is that there is always a price to be paid for speaking the truth, especially when those truths challenge the prevailing power structures. There is no getting around it. In this regard, a social contract only works if all the parties are in agreement. This means that the powerful, in control of the system, must give ascent to your ability to speak freely. This is the way it has always been. The less inclined the administrative system is to let you speak freely, the less you will be able to speak uncomfortable truths. This is just the way power works.
Secondly, we must recognize that limits on speech, on freedoms, must come from somewhere. A society without limits is a society without order. Either limits are self-imposed, imposed by the community and the culture, or in the absence of the first two, limits will be imposed by the state. It is in the interest of the state to undermine the ability or desire of persons or communities to impose moral limits, as this grows the power of the state to impose moral limits. A strong moral culture naturally limits the power of the state. It is in the interest of the liberal state to undermine morality so as to increase its power. I have written on this elsewhere.
In theory, this might mean radically reducing the size and reach of the state so as to foster the growth of small communities, encouraging them to do the work of maintaining moral boundaries by means of the culture of the community. But, for this to work society wide, you would likely need to return to a pre-industrial, largely agrarian, society.
The alternative, then, would be to seize the administrative state and impose a conservative, traditional morality. Again, as I have written elsewhere, that is also not going to work, as the administrative state was built by liberalism for liberalism’s desire for achieving human progress through the mechanism of technical administration. Imposing conservative morality upon society through the instrument of the administrative state would require the state to govern the totality of our lives. Our desire to use the administrative state for conservative ends would mean its complete victory over the entirety of life. We would lose by winning.
I remain open to the idea that it might be possible to maintain a certain level of technological sophistication, cleansing it of its progressive, liberal intent, subordinating it to moral, social and religious concerns. But this would require a change in our relationship to learning in general and science in particular. The very idea of science is built upon the progressive ideal. And since science is dependent up technology to turn theory into actual experiments, readjusting our relationship to technology would require us to change our understanding of learning, knowledge and wisdom, accepting and imposing limits upon what can and should be known. And since technology is integral to the market economy —one of the main drivers of technique was its ability to make money for the bourgeoisie merchant class— placing limits upon technology also means subordinating the economy to moral, social and religious values. We will talk more about this in the future, but the kinds of changes needed to properly become a “conservative” state would fundamentally change the nature of our society. You don’t get to keep modernity, and all its benefits and luxuries, but “based and moral.” This is why the comparisons to the movie “The Matrix” seem so fitting. It is hard for us to actually conceive of what a truly “conservative” society would look like. And when we look out over the world and see a conservative culture, our natural instinct is to label them “primitive” or “backwards.”
So what do we do? We can talk about the idea of burning it all down, but that is either unrealistic and/or too costly. That leaves us with working to establish a robust parallel polity which runs on a different operating system other than that of the liberal notion of “rights” and “freedoms.” It would recognize that all behavior in a flourishing society must strive for wisdom and virtue, and thus must be restrained by the limits of a functioning public morality.
Great post Kruptos. The question of whether institutions can, in practice, be neutral seems to be one of the primary divisions among “conservatives” or non-progressives today.
For a look into the history of the undermining of Christianity of the West, albeit a bit conspiratorial at the start for my taste, one can find Libido Dominandi over on archive.org
Second half or so covers propaganda, NGO predecessors, the Civil Rights movement, and the sexual revolution.