From Dave Chappelle to J.K. Rowling, and Dr. Seuss to Chris Harrison, cancel culture mobs have unceremoniously torn down celebrities and everyday Americans alike. In “The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All — But There is a Solution” (Simon & Schuster, out Oct. 17), Post columnist Rikki Schlott and Greg Lukianoff, president of First Amendment watchdog group FIRE, take a timely and data-rich deep-dive into how cancel culture works — and how we can short circuit it. In this exclusive excerpt, they argue that a revival of free speech culture is the antidote to the cancel culture that’s tearing our society apart:
What matters more to the maintenance of a free society: laws that support free speech, or a culture that supports it?
To answer that question, take a look at these three speech protections, each of which is legally afforded to citizens by different countries:
- “Everyone shall be guaranteed freedom of thought and speech.”
- “Citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, assembly, demonstration, and association.”
- “Everyone has the right to express and disseminate his or her thoughts and opinions by speech, in writing or in pictures or through other media, individually or collectively.”
These all sound like relatively principled, robust guarantees … until you find out that they’re the promises of Russia, North Korea, and Turkey, respectively — three countries with nightmarish records when it comes to upholding human rights.
There is a long list of countries with decent speech protections on the books that fundamentally undermine them in practice.
Therefore, good free speech laws + bad Free Speech Culture ≠ free speech in practice.
And, on the flip side, the Enlightenment flourished in eighteenth-century France, yielding great works from the likes of Voltaire and Rousseau — in spite of the fact that the French government and the Catholic Church alike constantly tried to stifle and even imprison many Enlightenment thinkers.
In short, Free Speech Culture + bad free speech laws = can still facilitate the French Enlightenment.
These contrasting examples reveal just how important a Free Speech Culture is to a society.
In fact, we’d go so far as to argue it’s actually more important than the laws on the books.
But what exactly is Free Speech Culture?
Historically, it’s been encapsulated by the popular idioms many of us grew up hearing time and again but which have sadly fallen out of favor today.
Think of the classics like “It’s a free country,” “to each his own,” “sticks and stones,” “everyone is entitled to their own opinion,” “address the argument, not the person,” “different strokes for different folks” and “who am I to judge?”
What all these sayings have in common is the idea that our culture must be highly tolerant of difference.
It’s a belief that we can live and let live, sharing our institutions and our country with those who hold differing views — a sense that, in our daily lives, our beliefs shouldn’t divide us.
Humanity has an innate desire to know the world as it is.
That thirst is the animating force of our millennia-long project of human knowledge.
A healthy Free Speech Culture acknowledges that knowing the world as it is requires knowing people as they are and what they really think.
It’s very important to know even the bad ideas in your society.
If you don’t want to follow the herd, you have to know what the herd really thinks.
Therein lies the utility of free speech in all its forms: All human expression (even untrue or hurtful speech) contains information about the world as it is and human beliefs as they are. Censoring and sending underground ideas we dislike doesn’t make them go away.
Free Speech Culture ensures that expression is maximized — and therefore that our knowledge of the world and our fellow citizens is, too.
It gives us an opportunity to learn about ourselves in profound — and sometimes uncomfortable — ways.
After all, isn’t it better to know if a chunk of the population holds some absurd belief?
Free Speech Culture must be protected at all costs, lest we lose touch with the true landscape of ideas.
Federal appellate Judge Learned Hand perhaps put it best in a 1944 speech: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”
In any society, free speech is under constant threat from several forces, including “censorship gravity,” the force that pulls all societies toward censorship.
A way to imagine this process is to think about posture.
You, like most people, probably slouch more often than you’d like, relaxing into gravity’s pull downward.
But if you’re mindful of your posture, you probably make a conscious and purposeful effort to stand up straight when you notice your shoulders rounding.
Much as your natural instinct is to slouch, society’s natural instinct is to censor.
And much like it takes discipline to improve your posture, it takes a remarkable degree of discipline for free societies to maintain free speech.
Though we might like to think of ourselves as intrinsically enlightened, the principles that underpin a free society only arose in relatively recent history and are incredibly rare in the scheme of human history.
A Free Speech Culture lets people make up their own minds — and gives them the freedom to transgress norms and even make mistakes while doing so.
That makes a society with a strong Free Speech Culture and ideological diversity a little chaotic.
It’s human nature to desire conformity over chaos, to call into question whether people really should be able to make up their own minds when a plurality believes lizard people are controlling the levers of society.
The only route to that conformity is censorship of divergent or “dangerous” viewpoints.
And therein lies censorship gravity — the collective force of psychological, cultural, and political forces pulling society down, away from freedom and toward conformity.
Censoring is humankind’s natural inclination.
It’s why we’ve spent such a small portion of human history not hunting down heretics.
And, like those with great posture, free societies are dutifully dedicated to resisting the forces of gravity constantly pulling them down toward embracing conformity.
Inevitably, our society’s decline in knowledge of and reverence for a free and tolerant society will lead to an erosion of free speech law.
How can our culture maintain free speech when upcoming generations are dubious about its value?
For now, we are extremely fortunate that the Supreme Court is populated by attorneys who were educated or rose to prominence during the 1970s, arguably the best decade for both free speech law and Free Speech Culture on campus.
But the gradual chipping away at Free Speech Culture in our institutions of higher education is especially dangerous.
If the schools we entrust to teach our future voters and our future leaders inculcate a distaste for free speech, how can we expect our legal freedoms to withstand this cultural assault in the long term?
We’re beginning to see the consequences of our divorce from Free Speech Culture take form in the downright childish methods of debate we use today.
For at least the past decade, Americans have been arguing with one another like kids on a playground.
Americans must resume arguing, acting, and thinking like adults.
As citizens we call for a resurgence of Free Speech Culture — the adulthood of the American mind — brought about by the return of old-fashioned rules of quality argumentation.
If we want a society that can build up, rather than just tear down, institutions, people, and ideas, we must promote a way of arguing that rejects childishness and helps the best ideas to rise.
That means actually talking to one another like adults and taking seriously the likelihood we might be wrong.
We also must embrace the fact that understanding the world is an arduous, never-ending process.
We need to take seriously forbidden ideas and taboo counterfactuals that challenge our own preconceptions.
Thought experimentation and devil’s advocacy must once again be praised, not condemned.
In the famous words of John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” Right opinions, false ideas, true insights, conspiracy theories — they’re all worth knowing.
The adulthood of the American mind is a cultural state in which we don’t shrink away from difficult discussions, in which we don’t censor inconvenient facts, and in which we don’t sugar-coat hard truths.
It’s a place where we are trusted to come to the right conclusion without being saved from ourselves.
It means taking a stand once and for all and accepting that it’s better to know the world as it really is than to be told comforting lies by authority.
Practicing free speech principles in our cultural institutions — higher education, corporations, social media, and on — is the lifeblood of a free society.
It’s what allows free expression to flourish in all contexts, public or private, regardless of the laws on the books.
Freedom of speech is essential to autonomy, to artistic expression, to self-government, and to holding power accountable.
And it allows society to divert the energy that would once explode into violence instead of robust arguments.
At the very beginning of the American founders’ vision is freedom of speech — the assertion simply that freedom of speech is a right that belongs to every human being, whether you believe that was granted by God or by the rational laws of the universe.
Re-embracing Free Speech Culture requires a return to our old folk wisdom — “to each his own,” “everyone is entitled to their own opinion,” “never judge a book by its cover,” “attack the argument, not the person,” and “always take seriously the possibility you might be wrong.”
In the age of Cancel Culture, we need to embrace a new saying, too: “Just because you hate someone doesn’t mean they’re wrong.”
A healthy, pluralistic society depends on a citizenry who can have serious discussions without resorting to manipulative, ad hominem tactics.
Reinvigorating a Free Speech Culture is the antidote to Cancel Culture.
Thanks to polling, we know that most Americans oppose Cancel Culture. If we begin leading by example and arguing like adults, more will come out against it publicly.
There is strength in numbers.
But this is bigger than Cancel Culture. Reinvigorating a Free Speech Culture is also the antidote to authoritarianism.
Even our Founding Fathers warned that our experiment might not last.
So we must all do our part to help maintain it.
If we get complacent, we may succumb to all the forces constantly working against the maintenance of a free society.
