Hehe. The jump from effect to cause is amusing.

I don’t think it’s just a Canadian thing. The Europeans have this too, with former fascist countries passing ironically restrictive laws. Really, American-style free speech is an aberration in the world, and still kind of an experiment.

I don’t know all the fancy lawyer words for this, but it seems like the European legal tradition is based on balance of goods within a national context. Hegel championed a kind of concrete legality over the older rigid legalisms and also against the caprice of magistrates. So it’s this view that the laws should be suited to a national spirit and situation within certain essential constraints of a modern state (freedom of religion is probably considered more important than free speech in his view). So when Italians fine some lady for criticizing Muslims they would argue that the law is in keeping with a particular situation in Italy that they want to maintain. Of course, this is totally stupid and shortsighted, but whatever.

The other side of this is the trap we’re in with gun control. An Italian woman was arguing with someone who had the liberal interpretation of the 2nd amendment that it actually ties our hands because it’s constitutional. I agreed with her, even though I’d like to see gun control (I shot a handgun in Hawaii, btw). She was having fun, because the Europeans either don’t have constitutions (like the UK) or they affirm concrete values (the famous 8 week vacations) and pledge to balance them out.

In the more extreme cases, such as cross burning or violent pornography, I fall on the side of restriction of speech (insofar as these are considered “speech”). I disagree that restricting this type of communication is starting down the slippery slope to widespread restriction, so perhaps I fall on the Canadian side of this issue? I too cannot stomach certain hateful practices that have been justified as being “speech” and therefore unrestrictable.

i knew there was a reason i talked funny: clearly i’m canadian at heart.

sadly, i’d argue we have less freedom in our expression, precisely because we’re so in love with our ‘extreme’ speech. as a people, we’ve become completely untutored in the finer points of communication, senses dulled to anything but crude blows. we only know how to respond to the most titillating or disgusting or shocking. nuance is dead. no one even knows what ‘satire’ means anymore, and ‘irony’ has come to mean ‘a convenient excuse for saying hateful shit and passing it off as a joke’. our media’s a joke, in large part because of this love of the extreme. we don’t have a discourse anymore. we have a shouting match. the winners in the marketplace of ideas tend to be those who operate through brute force, and i can’t understand why we encourage it, in business or in communication.

There are all sorts of things I can’t stomach that I nevertheless wouldn’t want to legislate against.

Also, I’m generally not a believer in general or sustained social decline — or else I am a strong believer in the vitality and endurance of civilization. Either way you see it, despite pervasive failures and pockets of utter social collapse, I’m inclined to look askance at “these days” assertions. People have been largely untutored, dull, crude, vulgar ruffians since the dawn of man (not fallen angels, risen apes, etc). What’s changed isn’t that we’ve become more vulgar, or that more of us are vulgar (proportionally I’d bet the opposite is so), but that for the first time in human history we oblige ourselves by law to educate 100% of our population, and expect that essentially all of us will enter into the greater conversation on some level. It’s a tall damn order, and not enough of us believe in it enough to really back it up, but it is progress, not decline.

We have discourse, we have nuance, we have all of these things. Do you see much of them on cable news? Of course not. But when has humankind ever been so civilized on such a massive scale? When has it ever been anything on such a massive scale? If you read newspapers from a century ago, they more mostly worse, not better.

There are all sorts of things I can’t stomach that I nevertheless wouldn’t want to legislate against.

Also, I’m generally not a believer in general or sustained social decline — or else I am a strong believer in the vitality and endurance of civilization. Either way you see it, despite pervasive failures and pockets of utter social collapse, I’m inclined to look askance at “these days” assertions. People have been largely untutored, dull, crude, vulgar ruffians since the dawn of man (not fallen angels, risen apes, etc). What’s changed isn’t that we’ve become more vulgar, or that more of us are vulgar (proportionally I’d bet the opposite is so), but that for the first time in human history we oblige ourselves by law to educate 100% of our population, and expect that essentially all of us will enter into the greater conversation on some level. It’s a tall damn order, and not enough of us believe in it enough to really back it up, but it is progress, not decline.

We have discourse, we have nuance, we have all of these things. Do you see much of them on cable news? Of course not. But when has humankind ever been so civilized on such a massive scale? When has it ever been anything on such a massive scale? If you read newspapers from a century ago, they more mostly worse, not better.

Joe, the anti-“Islamophobia” stuff is precisely stupid and short-sighted. It’s pretty much a short-circuiting of genuine politics, something which of course goes on all the time in America.

This is just to point out that there are already serious limits to acceptable discourse in our fine nation (cf. Hillary Clinton’s “disparaging” comment about MLK & LBJ on the campaign trail, or Jeremiah Wright’s “vicious celebrations of 9/11”). These effective limits on speech are more than substantial enough as it is. Progressives tend to worry, rightfully, about them with regard to issues like foreign policy; and conservatives (and the Clintons), again understandably, with regard to topics like race relations. There’s nothing but harm to be had from protecting our present sensitivities and mythologies with standing laws and using state power to punish those who want to criticize or question them. This seems like the kind of thing that political people on both left and right can agree on (oh, and sensible, normal, well-adjusted people too), provided they live in a stable enough polity.

I would hate for these laws to make our political discourse even less honest and more vapid, though if they did manage to do so I would have to be sort of … impressed.

I wish that things like “cross burning or violent pornography” could be set aside in a conversation about what should and should not be allowed to be said. Images are not speech. Not all expression is speech. Whether or not some things should be done or shown in the public domain seems like a separate issue from speech. Saying “I hate black people” is not the same thing as burning a cross, nor is “Women are objects to be used as I see fit” the same as violent pornography.

The problem with these speech laws, as I see it, is the danger that speaking the truth might turn out to be against the law if enough people don’t like hearing it. Outlawing the truth, or what might well be the truth, for the sake of not stepping on some people’s toes, is just plain bad.

Anonymous (umm, self-censoring?),

I agree. The question is whether free speech is to be treated as a concrete good (in Hegelian doublespeak an “absolute” or “real” good), which isn’t inviolable, or as a fundamental good, of the “give me freedom or death” kind, and whether a kind of holistic reason doesn’t still prescribe a strong form of free speech (whew! terrible sentence). An absolute or real good contains its limitation, so for example real freedom contains self-restriction. This actually makes sense on a non-legislative level. There are forms of speech that fall short of shouting fire in a crowded theater which still threaten the possibility of speech for meaningful communication, e.g., yelling, badgering, willful distortion. Jon Stewart told the Crossfire guys that they were “hurting America” by vitiating discourse. Obviously, there’s no practical way to deal with bad public speech legislatively (although our current media climate is largely due to bad Clinton-era deregulation). But on other levels there might be questions. In a classroom it might be necessary to restrict what men can say, or how they say it, because of the tendency of men to dominate discussions and establish a competitive mode.

European countries are set up to be extremely sensitive to the comfort level of ethnic minorities, in no small part because of the painful history that continent has. They’re viewing free speech as a real good that is part of the liberal but also multi-ethnic (“pluralistic”) traditional dispositions of their countries. The country with the strongest traditional (but I believe not constitutionally protected) form of free speech is England, so they have real conflict when the Sikh community seeks to have a supposedly defamatory play (by a Sikh woman) banned. A country like Italy that is basically always a step away from either Communism or Fascism sees it as normal to prevent a woman from fretting about the Muslim menace. Yet Europe as a whole still has trouble with Turkey arresting writers for “crimes against Turkishness”.

Each of these situations can be resolved by application of a higher, non-abstract reason. In England they allowed the Sikhs to exercise their freedom of assembly and protest the play until its run ended, which allowed the Sikhs to defend their group identity and also established them in the country’s liberal framework. In Italy, the reasoning was that allowing “hate speech” against Muslims would foment hate crimes and alienate immigrants. But the Italians, like the French and Germans, don’t actually do a good job of integrating their immigrants, and banning the speech doesn’t get rid of the native resentment. Instead they should “have the conversation”. Turkey’s crimes against Turkishness (the crime is acknowledging the Armenian genocide) is a sign that Turkey is like an unanalyzed patient, also with regard to its Islamic identity.

All of this is to say that stronger constructions of freedom of speech are reasonable even outside of the Lockean tradition of abstract right. On the other hand, we Americans evaluate our social goods in two passes, first with regard to rights, and only then with regard to balanced goods. This is clearly for better and worse. One ironic example of this is that in France they don’t allow abortions after the first trimester. There was an excellent article in Harper’s that suggested that the pro-life movement would have less ammunition if we did this as well, but Roe v. Wade sealed discussion through an application of an abstract right that doesn’t acknowledge any balance. I say this is ironic because the abstractness that benefited the pro-choice side seems to be a kind of religious abstractness that pervades our society. Everything that steps away from that abstractness, acknowledges balance and nuance, is somehow European.

A less controversial example is how we treat property. The idea that an individual has the right to leave a building abandoned for more than a year is insane.