Unlearning Liberty - Greg Lukianoff

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“checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.” In other words, the path of progress is a system of free speech, public disclosure, and active debate. It follows two important rules: First, no one gets the final say; we all must accept that no argument is ever really over, as it can always be challenged if not disproved down the line. Second, no one gets special, unchallengeable claims of “personal authority.” No one individual is immune to the criticism of others and none can claim to be above intellectual reproach. No one is omniscient or infallible, so we are all forced to defend our arguments with logic, evidence, and persuasion. No one gets the final say, even if he claims to be the head priest of Zeus.

      The radically open-minded “liberal science” approach to deciding what is right stands as one of the most important innovations in human history. In the broad view, societies that rely on this approach have flourished artistically, scientifically, and politically, while authoritarian orders have eventually languished.

      The grand blossoming of philosophy and science in the modern academy began with the “liberal science” approach. Colleges and universities were built on the recognition that you have to leave knowledge open to continuous debate, experimentation, critical examination, and discussion. Ideas that don’t hold up to this scrutiny should be discarded. It is a ruthless and tough system in which ideas that once gave us great comfort can be quickly relegated to the dustbin of history. It isn’t concerned with your feelings or your ego, as it has a much more important job: discerning what is true and wise.

      Interestingly, to succeed, liberal science relies on people being unafraid of being wrong on a regular basis.17 You are never going to get to the right answer if people aren’t constantly positing new hypotheses on top of new hypotheses. Even coming up with a “stupid” hypothesis is all part of the process of teasing out the truth—and sometimes those “stupid” hypotheses turn out to be right. Thought experiments are key to the system’s wild success. If you limit the process to ideas that are comfortable to everyone, you suffocate innovation and, yes, progress.

      Beyond Rauch’s big-picture philosophy, there are many more reasons for believing in free speech, including:

      THE SPIRITUAL: Free expression is especially important in the discussion of religious issues, since the desire to silence opposing spiritual views is very powerful. Amazingly, some people express sympathy on campus for “blasphemy” laws that prevent speech considered insulting to Islam, without understanding that almost everyone’s beliefs are blasphemy to someone.

      THE POLITICAL: A system that allows for censorship must necessarily put actual, flawed people in charge of deciding what does not get to be said. This is probably the most important reason to take that power out of the hands of authority. Even if we think authorities should be empowered to regulate opinion, they are likely to be too self-interested and self-deceived to do it fairly or, even, competently. Time and time again, those with the power to censor see criticism of themselves as what needs to be banned.

      THE ARTISTIC: Art without the ability to push boundaries and buttons can hardly be called art at all.

      THE COMEDIC: Free speech is the comedian’s best friend. After all, how much of comedy is about saying what we all know we shouldn’t say? Censorship is the natural enemy of comedy.

      THE PSYCHOLOGICAL: Free expression allows a crucial “safety valve” for society where people can vent frustrations. In less free societies, disagreements often fester to explode in violence or revolt.

      If you told me a few years ago that I would find fresh reasons for why free speech makes the world (and knowledge itself) better from the author of a book called Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech, I might have looked at you funny. But when I read several of the works of Cass Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard, I was surprised to find a treasure trove of new research on the importance of protecting dissent and a diversity of viewpoints.18 Most importantly, take Sunstein’s book Infotopia.19 It was written in the early days of what we call Web 2.0, way back (in Internet time, that is) in 2006, and Sunstein’s enthusiasm for advancing information technology is palpable throughout. In Infotopia, he explores the remarkable potential opened up by the communications revolution of the last several decades, whether it be in the form of open-source software, Wikis, prediction markets, or simply the access to thousands and thousands of opinions aggregated and presented to you on websites as basic as Zagat and Rotten Tomatoes.20

      Infotopia, however, also emphasizes something that might seem to be bad news for free speech advocates: much research shows that group deliberation (that is, discussion of topics among groups) often does not do a very good job of making opinions better or more accurate. Group deliberation sometimes amplifies a particularly vocal member’s incorrect opinions, it sometimes makes us more vulnerable to various logical fallacies, and it often results in group polarization.21 Several famous studies have shown that when you bring together like-minded people and have them discuss a topic, they tend to become even more extreme in their positions.22 It has been demonstrated that when a group of mixed viewpoints is broken into liberal and conservative groups that are then left to talk among themselves, the liberals emerge decidedly more liberal, and the same happens to conservatives, even when the individuals in the larger group had initially been much closer to agreement on the issues discussed. Infotopia illustrates how group deliberation may be no better at getting to the truth or to a wise course of action than other methods, including a simple vote among all the members of the group, and often it is worse.23

      The importance to free speech of Cass Sunstein’s voluminous research is what it reveals about why group decisions go wrong. Repeated throughout Infotopia is the idea that groups often fall short because they fail to get the full benefit of the wisdom and information of their individual members. When groups start to grow cohesive, they often discourage and even silence dissenting voices or ones with contrary, but potentially important, information. The result is what another social scientist, Irving Janis, famously dubbed “groupthink,” which is lethal to good decision making since it blinds us to holes in our logic, or to potential bad consequences of our decisions.24 Sunstein and others have diagnosed this problem in historical mistakes from the Bay of Pigs disaster, to the tragedy of the Space Shuttle Columbia, to the wild underestimate of the difficulties that would come with the war in Iraq.25

      Groupthink can result from forces as subtle as social pressure, an emphasis on group cohesion, the perception of someone’s status, or even who speaks first. The techniques that Sunstein recommends to reduce or eliminate these effects are precisely the remedies to uncritical certainty. They include appointing a devil’s advocate with the explicit role of taking the other side of any position, breaking up a group into opposing teams, and stressing critical thinking as a goal of greater importance than group cohesion.26

      Given the subtle forces that can stifle candor and impede the exchange of ideas, adding an outright threat to punish speech—which happens all too often on campus—is poison to the process of getting to better, more interesting, and more thoughtful ideas. After all, how on earth can you have someone play devil’s advocate on thorny public policy issues if everyone knows that the “wrong” point of view can actually get you in trouble? If we want our universities to produce the best ideas, we must do more than just protect diversity of opinion; we must train and habituate students to seek out disagreement, seek out facts that might prove them wrong, and be a touch skeptical whenever they find a little too much agreement on an issue. Campuses, however, are often doing the precise opposite: rewarding groupthink, punishing devil’s advocates, and shutting down discussions on some of the hottest and most important topics of the day.

      Universities take our best and brightest and put them through what is supposed to be an intellectual decathlon that helps our entire society develop better ideas. We are squandering this opportunity if we discourage dissent and if we do not train students to be brave in the face of ideas that upset them, to welcome challenging

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