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Between Mill and Plato

06-15-2019

Jonny Thakkar challenges those caught up in PC debates on colleges campuses to take a step back and “think philosophically—by defining terms, breaking down arguments, and interpreting others charitably while questioning ourselves.” His intervention is a welcome one in a conversation that often feels stuck-in-the-muck. Thakkar wants to put the political back into political correctness, while attuning our sensibilities to questions of political freedom. His argument introduces the possibility of a new orientation toward this ongoing debate, and will hopefully be the beginning of a conversation.

Debates over free speech on campus are not about formal rights but rather about what we might call real freedom. We have the formal right to speak freely on a given topic whenever there is no law preventing our doing so. Countries differ on which protections they give to citizens — Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany, for instance — and routinely discriminate between citizens on the basis of their roles, as when the United States denies military officers the right to speak contemptuously about senior politicians. But those who claim to have been silenced by political correctness typically have the legal right to say whatever it is they claim they cannot say. What they are really objecting to is the social pressure not to make use of that formal freedom — a pressure that, they argue, reduces their real freedom to express themselves.

That complaint is now associated with liberals like [Jonathan] Chait, who are then accused by leftists of a performative self-contradiction: If you’re publishing "in highly visible publications," Weigel asks, how have you been silenced? But historically speaking the distinction between formal and real freedom has typically been advanced by leftists against liberals, not the other way around — and real freedom has generally been understood as scalar, something you can have more or less of, rather than binary.

Thakkar’s focus upon “real freedom of speech” as opposed to the formal right of free speech is an important corrective to the usual PC wars. He turns to John Stuart Mill for the proposition that “you can know whether you really believe what you think you believe only if you genuinely consider what alternative beliefs have going for them. As Mill put it, people who have never "thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently … do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess."”

Thakkar’s most provocative claim is that if Mill provides the classic philosophical foundation for those who argue for a vibrant culture of free speech, Plato is the classic source for limiting and censoring free speech in the name of a social values. As Thakkar writes:

Mill’s argument is often cited by today’s free-speech warriors. But their opponents — the ones they call social-justice warriors — hardly ever cite the philosopher who I believe makes the strongest case for their view: Plato. In the Republic, Socrates argues that the only way to create a healthy society is to regulate the cultural environment with an eye to generating the right kind of ethos. If citizens are virtuous, then rules and regulations won’t be necessary; if they are vicious, then rules and regulations won’t work. An ethos comes about not only as a result of formal schooling but also through our daily interactions. The stories we tell, the jokes we make, the words we choose, the objects we produce, the models we imitate — each of those plays a part in constituting a cultural environment that transmits an understanding of what is right and good, and each must therefore be scrutinized accordingly.

That is what leads Socrates to insist on his famous program of censorship. Stories that portray the gods as capricious, he says, must be banned — out with Homer, then, despite his standing as the greatest of the ancient Greek poets. Those notorious strictures are just the beginning. Socrates goes on to imply that any activity that affects the cultural environment must be supervised with an eye to ethical and political criteria: painters, weavers, embroiderers, architects, and even the manufacturers of furniture must not "represent — whether in pictures, buildings, or any other works — a character that is vicious, unrestrained, slavish, and graceless." Not only that, but linguistic practices must also be watched over to ensure that citizens develop the right ideals. They should have correct "usages regarding beautiful, just, or good things." They should, for instance, call their leaders "preservers" rather than "masters" or "rulers." They should call conflict with other Greek states "discord" rather than "war." They should call something "ridiculous" only if rational argument has shown it to be bad.

Plato’s ideal society is authoritarian and undemocratic: The cultural environment is to be regulated by an expert elite, with the lower orders having no say. But we can imagine a liberal-democratic version of Platonism in which all citizens are charged with stewarding the cultural environment by means of their own daily actions — setting an example for others but also calling them out for their failings. Socrates himself offers a model for that when he issues what must surely be the first demand for political correctness in academic history. When Glaucon says that in constructing his ideal city Socrates has "produced ruling men that are completely beautiful," Socrates calls him out: "And ruling women, too, Glaucon, for you mustn’t think that what I’ve said applies any more to men than it does to women."

Positioning the current debates around the political and social limits on speech as an argument between Mill and Plato clarifies something essential. For Plato, those who must be censored and prevented from hearing the truth were the lower classes in society. The Guardians were tasked with deciding what was appropriate and what must be eliminated from public discourse. But the tension that Thakkar makes explicit is that in today’s culture of political correctness on campus, there is a very typical liberal and democratic fight about who gets to be the guardians.

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