The United States touts its commitment to free speech but American discourse has degenerated into self-absorbed info-tainment and trivia, ignoring many of the most pressing issues of the day, writes Michael Brenner.
By Michael Brenner
Freedom of speech’s centrality in civil liberties is a public as well as a private matter. After all, the point is not simply to empower persons to sound off about whatever passes through their mind or heart. Societies, for the most part, aren’t interested in speech as ad hominen self-affirmation. They are concerned about communication. That is to say, speech aimed at an audience with some degree of intent to influence how they think and potentially might act.
The two aspects of free speech too readily get mingled. In today’s discourse, they also tend to get confused. However, the issues they raise are, in fact, quite different with consequences of different orders of magnitude.
James Madison, a principal author of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights — and fourth president of the United States
At the end of the day, the hullabaloo on college campuses about “warning notices” in syllabi and “safe spaces” is not going to have a serious effect on our collective existence one way or another. “Charlie Hebdo” is another matter. People are being killed because of what newspapers and journals publish. Political attitudes, and perhaps actions, are being partially shaped by it.
In another sense, the debate at some universities (e.g. Berkeley) as to whether criticism of Israel should be scrutinized for anti-Semitic meanings, too, links free speech in the form of political commentary to issues of public policy. That should be made explicit rather than allowing a political agenda to masquerade as a defense against bigoted speech.
There a strong argument to be made that the truly big issue in America’s public life nowadays has to do not with speech per se – but its absence. The reason why such value was place on freedom of speech in the United States Constitution is its vital contribution to a healthy democratic polity. It is essential for the voicing of public opinion, for collective political action, for…