How “Silence is Violence” Can Become Compelled Speech – JONATHAN TURLEY

How “Silence is Violence” Can Became Compelled Speech – JONATHAN TURLEY

Jonathan Turley’s essay identifies a trend that is surfacing: “failing to utter certain words, prayers or pledges is deemed a confession of complicity or guilt.” He cites this an example.

This week, a mob surrounded diners (https://www.businessinsider.com/white-protesters-confront-dinersduring-black-lives-matter-protest-2020-8) outside several Washington restaurants, shouting “White silence is violence!” and demanding that diners raise a fist to support Black Lives Matter. Various diners dutifully complied as protesters screamed inches from their faces. One did not — Lauren Victor, who later said she has marched in protests for weeks but refused to be bullied. The mob surrounded her, and Washington Post reporter Fredrick Kunkle identified a freelance journalist (https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/08/25/dc-protesters-blmdiner-confrontation/) as one of the people yelling at Victor and demanding: “What was in you, you couldn’t do this?”

Later Turley says:

The transition from speech codes to commands is based on the same notion of “speech as harm.” Just as speech is deemed harmful (and thus subject to regulation), silence is now deemed harmful.

Turley doesn’t talk about where the idea of speech as harm arose but Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt do in their The Coddling of the American Mind. They refer to a 2017 The New York Times essay by Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor of psychology and emotion researcher at Northeastern University, in which Barrett claims: “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech – at least certain types of speech – can be a form of violence.” Turley’s example above shows that now it’s not enough to avoid politically incorrect language or even “micro-aggressions” where you can be taken to task even for unintentionally using the wrong words. Now even silence can be wrong. As he says, “the appetite for collective suppression will become a demand for collective expression.”

Turley’s use of the word “collective” twice in the same sentence reveals an issue I have with the constant drive to police expression: the drive to suppress individual thought. One side believes they have a monopoly on moral rectitude. So disagreement automatically means you’re immoral. You’re expected to purge your mind of “bad thoughts.”

I recall when I was going to Catholic Church in my youth we were taught that bad thoughts were as sinful as bad actions. (If I may take a slight and somewhat crude detour, George Carlin had a great skit on this where he says just thinking about “feeling up Ellen” consisted of multiple sins. It was a sin for you to want to feel up Ellen. It was a sin for you to plan to feel up Ellen. It was a sin for you to figure out a place to feel up Ellen. It was a sin to take Ellen to the place to feel her up. It was a sin to try to feel her up and it was a sin to feel her up. There were six sins in one feel!)

I have a reason for bringing up George Carlin and religion. As a former Roman Catholic, I was raised to believe humans are born with Original Sin, that we are all sinful by nature

My point is that we are expected to all think and speak alike. No diversity of opinion of allowed. It’s almost like we’re expected to plug into the Borg collective where not only is resistance futile, so is disagreement. (If you’re not familiar with my reference to the Borg collective the Borg was a cybernetic life form in Star Trek Next Generation that conquered other species then absorbed them into the Borg collective where each member became a drone with no individual free will. This link explains in more detail. When confronting the Star Trek crew, the Borg drones would say, “Resistance is futile.”) 

A kernel of truth lies under the concern of using language that can make people feel diminished, abused or oppressed. Pushing the idea that there is no such thing as an innocent misuse of language washes out the validity of this concern. Instead, ALL language that doesn’t meet these speech codes (as Turley calls them) means the person who uttered them is sinful, regardless of intent. Ultimately, it’s a no-win situation. The ultimate result squelches individual thought.

If you don’t agree that silence is violence then these people feel it’s OK to use violence, the physical kind, to silence you. Ultimately speech control boils down to thought control.

Self-censor to avoid censure?

This morning I played tennis with a guy who is roughly my age (60s) and who emigrated from the Russia when it was under Communist rule. He said he came here to have freedom of speech. He feels he doesn't have freedom of speech anymore. My friend said it isn't the government that is preventing him from expressing his ideas. He is self-censoring to avoid censure from his "friends" and family. That could be the sad slogan of our time: "Self-censor to avoid censure."

I know there is a fundamental difference between government censorship of speech and the feeling you can’t speak freely on politics with family or friends. The first is political freedom of speech; I’d call the second one social freedom of speech. (Yes, I know there are some limits on what you can say about other people that falls under defamation.)

The fragile generation - Jonathan Haidt Interview

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-fragile-generation/20257#.WcQOntN96SN

This is an excellent interview of Jonathan Haidt on the idea recently floated that it's OK to prevent certain people from speaking in public because their ideas are considered offensive and a form of violence.

Here is a summary that appears at the end.

In his forthcoming book Misguided Minds: How Three Bad Ideas Are Leading Young People, Universities, and Democracies Toward Failure, Haidt claims that certain ideas are impairing students’ chances of success. Those ideas being: your feelings are always right; what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; and the world is divided into good people and bad people. ‘If we can teach those three ideas to college students’, he says, ‘we cannot guarantee they will fail, but we will minimise their odds at success’.

So how can we resolve the problem of vulnerability among young Americans? Haidt says part of the solution must begin in childhood and will require parents to give their children daily periods of ‘unsupervised time’. ‘We have to accept the fact that in that unsupervised time there will be name-calling, conflict and exclusion. And while it’s painful for parents to accept this, in the long-run it will give them children that are not suffering from such high rates of anxiety and depression.’

As for university students, Haidt references a recent quote from CNN commentator Van Jones. Jones said: ‘I don’t want you to be safe, ideologically.’ Building on this, he says universities should help students develop their ‘anti-fragility’.

‘We need to focus on preparing students to encounter intellectual and ideological diversity. We need to prepare them for civil disagreements. We need to be very mindful of mental illness, but otherwise need to minimise the role of adult supervision in their lives. College is a major opportunity, once they have left home, for them to develop anti-fragility and we must not deprive them of that learning opportunity.’

Here is an article from The Atlantic as well.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why-its-a-bad-idea-to-tell-students-words-are-violence/533970/