Strangely enough, the Free Speech movement at Berkeley in the early 1960s began the social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Until everyone was allowed to swear and say their point of view in public, no progress could actually be made. Before this, students were more required in college to "tow the line" and not speak out unless they wanted to be expelled for doing so. The will of the professors was "Absolute" and could not be confronted in useful ways before this.
So, Mario Savio and the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley began the social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Free Speech Movement
(FSM) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place
during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of
California, Berkeley. The Movement was informally under the central leadership of Berkeley graduate student Mario Savio.
This is the text of a lecture delivered at the University of Michigan on Tuesday. The speech was sponsored by Wallace House.
I’d
like to express my appreciation for Lynette Clemetson and her team at
Knight-Wallace for hosting me in Ann Arbor today. It’s a great honor. I
think of Knight-Wallace as a citadel of American journalism. And, Lord
knows, we need a few citadels, because journalism today is a profession
under several sieges.
To name a few:
There
is the economic siege, particularly the collapse of traditional revenue
streams, which has undermined the ability of scores of news
organizations to remain financially healthy and invest in the kind of
in-depth investigative, enterprise, local and foreign reporting this
country so desperately needs.
There
is a cultural siege, as exemplified by the fact that a growing number
of Americans seem to think that if something is reported in the
so-called mainstream media, it is ipso facto untrue.
There’s
a technological siege, which not only has changed the way we work, and
distribute our work, but has also created a new ecosystem in which it is
increasingly difficult to distinguish fact from opinion, clickbait from
substance, and real news from fake.
Then
— need I even mention it? — there is the president of the United
States. We are all familiar with the ways in which Donald Trump’s
demagogic assault on the press has already normalized presidential
mendacity, mainstreamed “alternative facts,” and desensitized millions
of Americans to both. I’ll get to him in a moment.
But
there is also a fifth siege, and this is the one I want to focus on
today: This is the siege of the perpetually enraged part of our
audience.
This
is no small thing when it comes to the health, reputation and future
prospects of our profession. Journalism, by its nature, must necessarily
be responsive to its audience, attuned to its interests, sensible to
its tastes, alert to its evolution. Fail to do this, and you might not
survive as a news organization, never mind as an editor, reporter or
columnist.
At the same time, journalism can only be as good as its audience. Intelligent coverage requires intelligent readers, viewers and listeners.
We
cannot invest in long-form, in-depth journalism for readers interested
only in headlines, first paragraphs, or list-icles. We cannot purchase
the services of talented wordsmiths and expert editors if people are
indifferent to the quality of prose. We cannot maintain expensive
foreign bureaus if audiences are uninterested in the world beyond our
shores. We cannot expect columnists to be provocative if readers cancel
their subscriptions the moment they feel “triggered” by an opinion they
dislike.
In
sum, we cannot be the keepers of what you might call liberal
civilization — I’m using the word liberal in its broad, philosophical
sense, not the narrowly American ideological one — if our readers have
illiberal instincts, incurious minds, short attention spans and even
shorter fuses.
* * * * * *
An example: Last November, The New York Times published a profile
of a 29-year-old Ohio man named Tony Hovater. Mr. Hovater is a welder
from a suburb of Dayton. He’s happily married, middle class, polite,
plays drums, cooks pasta aglio e olio, and loves “Seinfeld.”
He
is also a proud and avowed Nazi sympathizer. He started out on the
political left, moved over to the Ron Paul right, and ended up marching
with the anti-Semitic white nationalists at Charlottesville. He doesn’t
believe six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and thinks Hitler was
“kind of chill.”
The
profile, by Times reporter Richard Fausset, was a brilliant case study
in Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” Hovater is not a thug, even if
his ideas are thuggish; not a monster, even if he takes inspiration from
one; not insane, even if his ideas are crazy. He reminds us that a
diabolical ideology gains strength not because devils propagate it, but
because ordinary men embrace it. And he warns us, as Bertolt Brecht put
it after the war, “The womb is fertile still, from which that crawled.”
Lest
anyone doubt what Fausset and his editors at the Times think of Hovater
and his ideas, the article was titled “A Voice of Hate in America’s
Heartland.” This is not, to say the least, a neutral way of introducing
the subject.
Yet
that did not seem enough for some Times readers, who erupted with fury
at the publication of the article. Nate Silver, the Times’s former
polling guru, said the article did “more to normalize neo-Nazism than
anything I’ve read in long time.” An editor at The Washington Post
accused us of producing “long, glowing profiles of Nazis” when we should
have focused on the “victims of their ideologies.” The Times followed
up with an explanatory, and somewhat apologetic, note from the national
editor.
No
doubt, there may have been ways to improve the profile. There always
are. But there was something disproportionate, not to say dismaying,
about the way that so many readers rained scorn on The Times’s
good-faith effort to better understand just what it is that makes
someone like Hovater tick.
Just what do these readers think a newspaper is supposed to do?
* * * * * *
A
newspaper, after all, isn’t supposed to be a form of mental comfort
food. We are not an advocacy group, a support network, a cheering
section, or a church affirming a particular faith — except, that is, a
faith in hard and relentless questioning. Our authority derives from our
willingness to challenge authority, not only the authority of those in power, but also that of commonplace assumptions and conventional wisdom.
In
other words, if we aren’t making our readers uncomfortable every day,
we aren’t doing our job. There’s an old saying that the role of the
journalist is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, but
the saying is wrong. The role of the journalist is to afflict, period.
News is new — new information, new challenges, new ideas — and it is meant to unsettle us.
That’s
a good thing. To be unsettled and discomforted is the world’s great
motivator. It is a prick to conscience, a prod to thinking, a rebuke to
complacency and a spur to action.
Now,
when I say we need to be making our readers uncomfortable, I don’t mean
we should gratuitously insult them if we can avoid it. But neither
should we make an effort to play to their biases, or feed this or that
political narrative, or dish the dirt solely on the people we love to
hate, or avoid certain topics for fear of stirring readers’ anger, even
if it means a few canceled subscriptions. Especially in an age in which
subscribers account for an ever-greater share of our revenue, publishers
will have to be as bold in standing up to occasional, if usually empty,
threats of mass cancellations for this or that article as they were in
standing up to the demands of advertisers in a previous era.
What
I mean by making readers uncomfortable is to offer the kind of news
that takes aim at your own deeply held convictions and shibboleths.
There are people on the political right who don’t like hearing that the
correlation between firearms and homicides is positive, not inverse —
but a positive correlation is what the data show. Some environmentalists
may believe that genetically modified “Frankenfoods” are bad for your
health, but the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence tells us they
are fine to eat.
The
truth may set you free, but first it is going to tick you (or at least a
lot of other people) off. This is why free speech requires
constitutional protection, especially in a democratic society. Free
speech may be the most essential vehicle for getting the truth out. But
the truth, as anyone minimally versed in history knows, is rarely
popular at first.
Barely
50 years ago, it was an unpopular truth that there was absolutely
nothing unnatural about the love that went by the horrible name of
“miscegenation.” Other unpopular truths one could mention include gay
rights, women’s suffrage, and evolution. These truths could only have
made their debut in the public square, and eventually gained broad
acceptance, under the armed guard, so to speak, of the First Amendment.
But
not just the First Amendment. In addition to a legal sanction, free
speech has flourished in the United States because we have had a
longstanding cultural bias in favor of the gadfly, the muckraker, the
contrarian, the social nuisance. For over a century, editors and
publishers and producers — at least the more enlightened ones — have
gone out of their way to make allowances for opposing points of view.
They
do so not because they have no strong convictions of their own, but
rather out of a profound understanding that the astute presentation of
divergent views makes us more thoughtful, not less; and that we cannot
disagree intelligently unless we first understand profoundly. They do so
because they believe that social progress depends on occasionally
airing outrageous ideas that, on close reflection, aren’t outrageous at
all. They hold firm to the conviction that moving readers out of their
political or moral comfort zones, even at the risk of causing upset, is
good for mind and soul. Ultimately, they do so because we will not be
able to preserve the culture and institutions of a liberal republic
unless we are prepared to accept, as Judge Learned Hand put it in 1944,
that the “spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it
is right” — and must therefore have the willingness to listen to the
other side.
This
was what Adolph Ochs knew in 1896, when he promised that under his
stewardship The New York Times would “invite intelligent discussion from
all shades of opinion.” The Times, like other papers, may not have
always lived up to that promise as well as it might have done. But as
some of you may have noticed, it most emphatically is now, to the loud
consternation of many of our readers.
* * * * * *
I do my best to appreciate the concerns of these readers. I understand that many of them — many of us
— believe the 2016 election marked a political watershed in which
liberties we have long taken for granted are being attacked and possibly
jeopardized by a president whose open contempt for a free press has few
precedents in American history. I understand the justifiable fear these
readers have for a White House in which the truth is merely optional,
and in which normal standards of courtesy or decency have lost the
purchase they previously had under Democratic and Republican
administrations alike.
I also understand that these readers see The New York Times as a citadel, if not the citadel,
in standing up to this relentless assault by the president and his
minions. I think they are right. The country needs at least one great
news organization that understands that the truth is neither relative
nor illusory nor a function of the prevailing structure of power — but
also that the truth is many-sided; that none of us has a lock on it; and
that we can best approach it through the patient accumulation of facts
and a vigorous and fair contest of ideas.
That,
at any rate, is what I think we are trying to do at The Times, and I
can only hope that more people will see its virtue as time goes by. That
obviously demands good and consistent communication on our part. But,
to return to my theme today, it also requires intelligence on the part
of our readers.
How
can we get our readers to understand that the purpose of The Times is
not to be a tacit partner in the so-called Resistance, which would only
validate the administration’s charge that the paper is engaged in veiled
partisanship rather than straight-up fact-finding and truth telling?
Some
readers, for example, still resent The Times for some of the
unflattering coverage of Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign, as if
the paper’s patriotic duty was to write fluff pieces about her in order
to smooth her way to high office. Again, do these readers comprehend
that we are in the business of news, not public relations? And does it
not also occur to them that perhaps the real problem was coverage that
was not aggressive enough, allowing Mrs. Clinton to dominate
the Democratic field in 2016 despite her serious, and only belatedly
apparent, shortcomings as a candidate?
As
it is, it is not as if there is a great surfeit of pro-Trump news and
opinion in the pages of The Times. I think that’s a shortcoming of ours.
We are a country in which about 40 percent of voters seem to be solidly
behind the president, and it behooves us to understand and even
empathize with them, rather than indulge in caricatures. Donald Trump
became president because millions of Americans who voted for Barack
Obama in 2012 voted Republican four years later. Those who claim this
presidency is purely a product of racism need some better explanation to
account for that remarkable switch.
* * * * * *
The
deeper point, however, is that if one really wants to “resist” Trump,
especially those of us in the news media, we might start by trying not
to imitate him or behave the way he does.
The
president is hostile to the First Amendment. Let’s be consistent and
expansive champions of the First Amendment. The president belittles and
humiliates his political rivals. Let’s listen to and respect our
detractors. The president loves to feel insulted and indignant, because
his skin is thin and it thrills his base. Let’s hold off on the
hair-trigger instinct to take offense. The president accuses first,
gathers evidence later. Let’s do the opposite. The president embraces
ugly forms of white-identity politics. Let’s eschew identity politics in
general in favor of old-fashioned concepts of citizenship and
universalism.
I
could go on, but you get the point. The answer to a politics of
right-wing illiberalism is not a politics of left-wing illiberalism. It
is a politics of liberalism, period.
This
is politics that believes in the virtues of openness, reason,
toleration, dissent, second-guessing, respectful but robust debate,
individual conscience and dignity, a sense of decency and also a sense
of humor. In a word, Enlightenment. It’s a capacious politics, with
plenty of room for the editorials of, say, The New York Times and those
of The Wall Street Journal. And it is an uncomfortable politics, because
it requires that each side recognize the rights and legitimacy, and
perhaps even the value, of the other.
* * * * * *
The
nomination and election of Trump was, for me, the plainest evidence of
the extent to which the liberal spirit has withered on the political
right. I’ve written and spoken about this phenomenon many times before,
so I won’t get into it here. What worries me is the extent to which it
is equally prevalent on the political left.
Case in point: Last month, I wrote a column under the title, “A Modest Immigration Proposal: Ban Jews.”
The
word “modest” might have been a tip-off to modestly educated readers
that I was not, in fact, proposing to ban Jews at all. My point was to
note that Jewish immigrants of a century ago, including my own
ancestors, faced the same prejudices that modern-day immigrants from
“S-hole” countries face today, and yet went on to great success. In
other words, it was a pro-immigration piece, in line with the many other
pro-immigration pieces I’ve written for the Times.
Social
media went berserk. I was called a “literal Nazi,” guilty of “garden
variety bigotry.” Others accused me of giving aid and comfort to
neo-Nazis, even if I wasn’t quite a neo-Nazi myself. A great deal of the
reaction was abusive and obscene.
By
now I’m sufficiently immunized to the way social media works that none
of this hurts me personally, at least not too much. And, at its best,
platforms such as Twitter are useful for injecting more speech, from a
vastly wider and more diverse variety of voices than we ever heard from
before, into our national conversation.
What
bothers me is that too many people, including those who are supposed to
be the gatekeepers of liberal culture, are using these platforms to try
to shut down the speech of others, ruin their reputations, and publicly
humiliate them.
How
many people bother to read before they condemn? Are people genuinely
offended, or are they looking for a pretext to be offended — because
taking offense is now the shortest route to political empowerment? Am I,
as a columnist, no longer allowed to use irony as a rhetorical device
because there’s always a risk that bigots and dimwits might take it the
wrong way? Can I rely on context to make my point clear, or must I write
in fear that any sentence can be ripped out of context and pasted on
Twitter to be used against me? Is a plodding, Pravda-like earnestness of
tone and substance the only safe way going forward?
Perhaps
the most worrisome question is: To what extent are people censoring
themselves for fear of arousing the social media frenzies? There’s a
reason why Katie Roiphe is writing about the “whisper networks” of women
who aren’t 100 percent in line with the #MeToo movement. It should
profoundly alarm anyone who cares for #MeToo that such a piece should
have needed to be written, in the reliably liberal pages of Harper’s
Magazine, no less. The job of #MeToo is to put a firm and hopefully
final stop to every form of sexual predation, not to enforce speech
codes.
This
move toward left-wing illiberalism is not new, and the list of thinkers
who have waged war against that illiberalism, from Arthur Schlesinger
Jr. in the 1940s to Christopher Hitchens in the 2000s, amounts to a roll
call of liberal honor. I think we are awaiting our new Hitchens today,
in case any of you want to apply for the job. All you need is a
first-class brain and a cast-iron stomach.
* * * * * *
So where does this leave us?
I
gave this talk the title: “Free Speech and the Necessity of
Discomfort.” Yesterday morning, when I retweeted Knight-Wallace’s tweet
advertising this speech, someone wrote, “Man, I hope he gets shouted
down at some point.” Maybe he was being ironic. At any rate, I’m happy
to note that none of you has shouted me down — so far!
I
trust that’s because all of you recognize that, even if I may have said
some things that made you uncomfortable and with which you profoundly
disagree, there is a vast difference between intellectual challenge and
verbal thuggishness, between a robust and productive exchange of ideas
and mere bombast, between light and heat.
It’s
fair to say that Americans of different ideological stripes feel that
many things have gone profoundly amiss in our social and political life
in recent years. We all have our diagnoses as to what those things are.
But one of them, surely, is that we are rapidly losing the ability to
talk to one another.
The
president has led the way in modeling this uncivil style of discourse.
But he has plenty of imitators on the progressive left, who are equally
eager to bully or shame their opponents into shutting up because they
deem their ideas morally backward or insufficiently “woke.” As each side
gathers round in their respective echo chambers and social media silos,
the purpose of free speech has become increasingly more obscure.
Its
purpose isn’t, or isn’t merely, to allow us to hear our own voices, or
the voices of those with whom we already agree. It is also to hear what
other people, with other views, often anathema to ours, have to say.
To
hear such speech may make us uncomfortable. As well it should.
Discomfort is not injury. An intellectual provocation is not a physical
assault. It’s a stimulus. Over time, it can improve our own arguments,
and sometimes even change our minds.
In
either case, it’s hard to see how we can’t benefit from it, if we
choose to do so. Make that choice. Democracy is enriched if you do. So
are you.
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