On Rights and Freedom

With Parler still down it looks like the only chance they’ve got is to turn to the Russians. Imagine having to go through Russia to set up a platform upon which people can speak freely, even if they are “bad” or “dangerous” ideas. To me at least, this makes free speech - or speech that countermands or contradicts the establishment or status quo - no longer protected speech. And silencing your political opponents is one thing. But what if someone decides it’s a bad or dangerous idea to believe that the world was made by God or that 2000 years ago a man rose from the dead? Would you worry about free speech then? You have to wonder if other rights will follow this same course in America.

But the thing about humans is that they are fundamentally free. Humans will do what humans will do, and whatever! they do what they want. They will have their views and opinions, and they will share them freely. The end of Parler does not mean the end of free speech, it just means the end of free, protected speech as a constitutional right in America. Just like you were not free to slander or defame someone (unless they are a public person - then all bets are off), or yell “fire” in a crowded theater (theaters which may never be crowded again), or incite a mob to a specific act of violence (still up for grabs!), what you are not free to do is speak against or even question the current politically correct groupthink of American liberal society.

What you are free to do is make lots of insanely violent, pornographic media that are filled with anarchy and a/immorality, glorifying evil, mental illness, and drug addiction. Reminder to myself - a separate post on morality and what it means in 21st century America. You can also label the deeply held beliefs of others as “hate.” Beliefs that, a generation or two ago, were part of the mainstream of American society: beliefs about God, marriage, sexuality, and truth. What you are allowed/expected to do is to plug yourself and your children to into the internet (streaming or gaming, or both) at end of a long day of schooling or working (from home), order Uber Eats or GrubHub, check your bank account for your stimulus check, and finish the night by amusing yourself to death.

As long as you don’t publicly state your disagreement with the status quo.

Especially on Parler, because they’re bad.

I know it’s political, and I know that some people said legitimately bad things on Parler. But they say legitimately bad things on Twitter and Facebook, too. I also see legitimately bad things whenever I (briefly) turn on Instagram or see something that was on TikTok (no I don’t have TikTok, and my one picture on the “Gram” is a fancy ice cream sandwich I made this one time - doing my best to keep it that way). And I’m not being moralistic here and saying it’s the badness of the content on these platforms - only that we all make decisions about which things (and platforms) to focus on as the “bad.” My point is that, as a society, everything goes. Except, of course, for things that disagree with received a/morality of the society.

This is nothing new. In the 5th century, Augustine described Roman society as a current, a river, a torrential flood:

“But woe unto you, you flood of human custom! Who shall stay your course? How long shall it be before you are dried up? How long will you carry down the sons of Eve into that huge and formidable ocean, which even they who are embarked on the cross (like a lifeboat) can scarcely pass over?” (Confessions 1.25)

Or again, as Augustine describe the “education” of Roman youths in the myths and immorality of the gods:

O hellish river, human children clutching their fees are still pitched into you to learn about these exploits, and general interest is aroused when education is publicly touted in the forum...(Confessions, 1.26)

This hellish river, this flood of human custom, is still with us today. It makes us free to do anything we want in American culture, except speak against it, believe something contrary to it. Like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the only command you can’t give the computer is the one that turns it off, permanently.

And so, we are indeed free as humans. We have the right (for now) to think and believe whatever we want. And we are fundamentally free to say what we think and believe. We may not have a protected platform for the expression of that speech, and we may suffer the consequences of a society that says, “The content of your speech is disagreeable. Don’t say it again. Now, here’s a ticket for you and each of your family members. Go watch this movie, and when you come out, we want you to say what is expected.”

“Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer,” says Wendell Berry. No longer truly free, because every thought and action you have and do will be eminently predictable by the society and the powers that be. People (including myself) make 1984 references for a reason. But Neil Postman, the thinker behind the brilliant phrase, “Amusing ourselves to death,” thought Huxley’s Brave New World would be a better description of the future, in which drugs and entertainment are the means by which social control is established. It turns out both of them might have been right.

But nobody ever thought the revolution would happen with such agonizing slowness. We thought it would be World War III, that we’d all be in the back of pickups fighting Russians with 30-06s, dramatic and patriotic and cataclysmic. We did not expect it to play out over three or four generations. We did not expect to be so pleasurably lulled into compliance.

But freedom, like beauty, goodness, and truth, has a way of breaking through the cracks...