Content warning: References to politically- and racially-motivated violence, and quite a bit of coarse language directed toward gay and transgender people, including a slur which you can probably guess pretty easily.
One of the biggest talking points online among all segments of the liberal political population, be they liberal in the modern american political sense, centrist, or conservative, is free speech. So much so in fact that it's become something of a meme among people who either don't know or don't care how terrible making fun of "freeze peach" looks to people who don't have a particular theoretical background to contextualize such statements.
I say this as someone who was myself one of those centrists who would always get really conspicuously upset at anything I perceived to be a danger to freedom of speech, and get really annoyed at people who ridiculed these concerns. (It doesn't help that a lot of the arguments posted in response were infuriatingly inadequate.)
So let's take a bit of a closer look at free speech as an idea and what that implies. Big important disclaimer: I'm not an expert on any of this stuff, and I'm definitely not the best person you could be getting ideas from, if any of what I say here interests you please for the love of god go do further research that involves reading stuff written by people smarter and more eloquent than me. I would not consider myself an amateur philosopher because that would be an insult to amateur philosophers, I'm just some loser on the internet who watches and reads philosophy-related content and tries to pick stuff up from it as best I can.
With that out of the way, here's my current understanding of free speech and the various ideas which informed it, greatly paraphrased. The first thing to touch on is some ideas about speech acts put forth in the 50s by one J.L. Austin; The common idea of language among most of the general public is that language is a descriptive exercise, but Austin identifies a second component to the speech act; the performative. Essentially, in Austin's view, speech comes in at least two sorts: the descriptive act, which is designed to, as the name would imply, describe something about the world around you, communicate an idea of what is, be it correct or false; and the performative act, the degree to which your speech creates a change in the world around you, intentionally or otherwise. An example of a primarily descriptive speech act would be saying "the dog is outside." Acts don't fall neatly into one of the two categories, there's almost definitely a performative component to this in context, but no reasonable person is about to argue that it doesn't seek mainly to describe the world as the speaker perceives it. A primarily performative speech act would be, say, telling someone to give you their money you'll shoot them. Again, these categories aren't segregated, there's definitely a descriptive element here, you are communicating a view of the world, namely that if the recipient doesn't acquiesce to your demands there will be a particular response (the firing of the gun,) but it's undeniable that the primary purpose of this statement is to influence the actions of the person in front of you, to create a particular feeling in them that will compel them to give the speaker their money.
Now this latter example is pretty widely recognized, if not in these precise terms; in most civilized countries, it is illegal to threaten another person, because the law recognizes at least the effect that this sort of speech has, if not necessarily the entire theoretical framework built to try to understand this phenomenon. Where this gets interesting is when you take this idea of the performative action out of the material world of money and guns, and into the much squishier and more loosely organized world of social interactions. This is where most people tend to balk, because it's where things get messy, so before I launch into this segment let's get some further disclaimers out of the way:
What I'm about to talk about is heavily context-dependent and as such I don't think it makes any sense to enact legislation around it, as one thing the law is very bad at is making sense of context. (And that of course is beyond the fact that I just don't like federal legislation as a concept or practice in the first place.) Additionally, due to the heavily contextual nature of these ideas, I'm not advocating that any particular word should be considered universally unacceptable. If I say "faggot" right now in this blog post in a clinical, almost purely descriptive way, referencing the word itself rather than a particular person, obviously that is a context in which it is mostly harmless. There is of course always the possibility that someone reading this has a personal history with the word which is such that they'll be made to feel uncomfortable regardless of my usage or intent; but it doesn't necessarily make sense to build societal norms around edge cases. (That said, it does make total sense to build group norms around the needs of the people in the group, so if you're friends with anyone who's uncomfortable with any usage of a particular word I would strongly advise to indulge them.)
What I'm suggesting is that people should think about the context in which they are saying things, and what the effects of those statements might be, and weigh these possibilities carefully, because if speech is used in a reckless manner it can have the performative effect of suppressing other people's speech.
And now it's time to get into my concrete example, because without it that last claim probably looks pretty weird to anyone who's in the position I was in several months ago.
This particular example is one I'm intimately familiar with, because it's one that I'm currently living myself. For a bit over a year now, I've been working at a particular factory which shall remain nameless for the sake of my privacy; Last January, a few months into working at said factory, I came to the realization that I would prefer to live as a woman, and decided to transition. As of yet, I'm not on HRT, as I'm waiting for my medical insurance to kick in at the start of 2020, and in my general offline life I've only come out to my immediate family and my roommate; from the perspective of my coworkers, I'm just another guy. I haven't spoken about a great many aspects of myself in front of them, in fact; my leftist political leanings and my bisexuality are a couple other topics that I've consciously avoided around the workplace.
These are topics that my coworkers (whose names are changed in this post,) for their part, don't take any pains to avoid themselves; I'm quite familiar with their thoughts on politics and sexuality, having been unable to avoid overhearing them while in the break room on several occasions. In particular, one coworker, who can most accurately be described as "a fucking boomer," and who will be called "Harry" in this post, has spoken out quite vocally on several occasions while I was trying to enjoy my break, with some highlights being:
-In a portion of the conversation I was not privy to, Harry and a coworker reached the subject of gender segregated bathrooms and which ones transpeople (well, let's be honest, transwomen, as Harry, like most boomers, doesn't really seem to even be aware of the concept of transmen) should be allowed to use; after a short time on this topic, in which both agree that "men" (transwomen) shouldn't be allowed in the women's room, Harry opines that "the way I see it, there should be four bathrooms: Men, Women, Lesbians, and Fags."
-On a later occasion, Harry speaks, in shock, to a coworker, describing a television ad he saw the previous night, which depicts a gay couple, much to Harry's chagrin.
-One morning Harry walks in and, upon seeing my copy of Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith's "Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration" sitting on the break room table, remarks " 'Open Borders,' huh? Heh, sure, let all those fuckers in, I'll shoot every one of 'em."
-My team lead, who will be called Devin for this post, is browsing his facebook feed on his break and sees a post regarding hate speech legislation or some similar topic, at which point he looks toward Harry and asks if he's heard of this "hate speech" business, to which Harry replies he hasn't, at which point Devin explains that "hate speech means that if you say something the liberal media doesn't like, that means it's violence, and they can arrest you for it." Harry cuts in to suggest "Sure, let 'em try, I'll shoot all them faggots."
-While walking into the break room, I catch just the tail end of a conversation between Harry and another coworker, just hearing, out of context, Harry say "kill all them motherfuckers," to which the other coworker replies "hell yeah, fuckin' commies." I walk across the room and retrieve my copy of Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread from the cubby where I'd left it, and sit down to read for the duration of my break.
I'd like to assume that Harry is engaging in hyperbole for the sake of humor, indeed I sort of need to believe that he's not going to actually engage in violence toward me should he discover the fact that I currently have a boyfriend, or that I self-identify as a communist, or when my breasts start growing in after I start HRT. By the same token, I need to believe that should an altercation occur, my equally reactionary, equally anti-LGBT team lead will intervene on my behalf rather than simply allow this situation to play out, despite the fact that he's made no effort to intervene when this sort of explicitly violent rhetoric was being used in the break room. If I don't believe these things, it becomes untenable for me to continue working at my job, and working at my job needs to be tenable because I don't have any other option; my roommate and I share one car, so we can't work at two separate establishments, and neither of us makes enough to cover rent and utilities single-handedly, so we need to both work. I have no choice but to believe, at least to some degree, that Harry isn't actually as violent as he claims to be; at the same time, I'm not about to take chances. Hearing these things makes me uncomfortable, obviously, in fact it tends to ruin my break by making it impossible to relax, but I'm not about to argue back toward a man who will, completely unprovoked, express a desire to shoot people for being different to him on several axes along which I am decidedly different from him. I'm not about to approach Devin about it because I don't know how he'd respond to such a thing, given that he had no objections to such things being said to him in front of several other people in the break room. I don't feel comfortable going to HR about it in light of the fact that several months ago somebody else, "Steve" whom I barely know, decided to play a "prank" on a friend of his, "Ron," whom I also barely know, by telling Ron that I had complained to HR about him and gotten him fired, and Ron later mentioned offhandedly that he was planning on showing up to my house that night and beating me up, until Steve had revealed to him that it was a ruse.
All of this creates a particular context in which I think it would be extremely difficult to argue that my personal freedom of speech has not been severely curtailed by the context in which I exist; Not through legislation or even direct threats, I'm certainly free to say what I like while I'm at home, but at work I'm in an environment in which, due to the degree to which I am outnumbered by openly and explicitly intolerant people, who espouse violent views and desires without a second thought, there is an undeniable atmosphere of suppression toward people like myself; my beliefs, my experiences, and my identity are completely stifled by people who are by and large unaware that there is even anything there to stifle.
This is what people are talking about when they point out that certain speech acts have the effect of suppressing other speech acts; Openly espousing views that are denigrating toward marginalized groups can and will have the effect of silencing them, projecting the idea that it is unsafe for them to speak about themselves and their concerns. Now, to reiterate from the intro to this post, this isn't universal; in my discord group we throw around "faggot" like it's going out of style, because the people in that server are aware of the context in which I, a transwoman dating a man who I hooked up with before I decided to transition, am using the term. Obviously my friends know that when I call someone a faggot, my intent isn't to denigrate people who aren't straight, and that they have nothing to fear in speaking about their homosexual attractions and relationships in front of me, because I have created an environment in which that is common knowledge. It's a completely different context from my experience working in a factory staffed primarily by conservatives and reactionaries and hearing someone in the break room joke around about shooting faggots, commies, and immigrants.
Of course, these are two extreme scenarios. The more usual scenario is just being out in public, or on twitter; in which case, the context is that of society as a whole rather than the particular community the participants are living in. And in such cases, people like me are less likely to feel a direct threat to their well-being the way I do at work, but the historical treatment of various marginalized groups, indeed, the fact that they are marginalized, is very likely to have a chilling effect on their speech.
I'm not here to tell you that you can never say slurs, or make edgy jokes, or anything like that. What I am saying, is that the things you say can have a profound effect on the people around you, and that if you genuinely care about free speech for all, it would be hypocritical not to work toward societal norms that make these sorts of performative speech acts less acceptable in public. Say what you want among your friends in private, where you can easily control the context and ensure that your statements are understood the way you want them to be, but maybe cool it on twitter.
And the same goes to all the libs out there mocking people's freeze peach concerns. Consider the fact that a number of people are in positions where they have legitimate reason to be concerned for their freedom of speech, and that mocking them for it exacerbates that scenario, and that even in the case of people who have never really experienced being silenced, these sorts of jokes are more likely than not just going to help radicalize them toward conservatism. Don't be the sorts of jovially dismissive, smilingly cruel bullies that reactionaries like to pretend all of their opponents are. Reexamine the effects of your speech.
One of the biggest talking points online among all segments of the liberal political population, be they liberal in the modern american political sense, centrist, or conservative, is free speech. So much so in fact that it's become something of a meme among people who either don't know or don't care how terrible making fun of "freeze peach" looks to people who don't have a particular theoretical background to contextualize such statements.
I say this as someone who was myself one of those centrists who would always get really conspicuously upset at anything I perceived to be a danger to freedom of speech, and get really annoyed at people who ridiculed these concerns. (It doesn't help that a lot of the arguments posted in response were infuriatingly inadequate.)
So let's take a bit of a closer look at free speech as an idea and what that implies. Big important disclaimer: I'm not an expert on any of this stuff, and I'm definitely not the best person you could be getting ideas from, if any of what I say here interests you please for the love of god go do further research that involves reading stuff written by people smarter and more eloquent than me. I would not consider myself an amateur philosopher because that would be an insult to amateur philosophers, I'm just some loser on the internet who watches and reads philosophy-related content and tries to pick stuff up from it as best I can.
With that out of the way, here's my current understanding of free speech and the various ideas which informed it, greatly paraphrased. The first thing to touch on is some ideas about speech acts put forth in the 50s by one J.L. Austin; The common idea of language among most of the general public is that language is a descriptive exercise, but Austin identifies a second component to the speech act; the performative. Essentially, in Austin's view, speech comes in at least two sorts: the descriptive act, which is designed to, as the name would imply, describe something about the world around you, communicate an idea of what is, be it correct or false; and the performative act, the degree to which your speech creates a change in the world around you, intentionally or otherwise. An example of a primarily descriptive speech act would be saying "the dog is outside." Acts don't fall neatly into one of the two categories, there's almost definitely a performative component to this in context, but no reasonable person is about to argue that it doesn't seek mainly to describe the world as the speaker perceives it. A primarily performative speech act would be, say, telling someone to give you their money you'll shoot them. Again, these categories aren't segregated, there's definitely a descriptive element here, you are communicating a view of the world, namely that if the recipient doesn't acquiesce to your demands there will be a particular response (the firing of the gun,) but it's undeniable that the primary purpose of this statement is to influence the actions of the person in front of you, to create a particular feeling in them that will compel them to give the speaker their money.
Now this latter example is pretty widely recognized, if not in these precise terms; in most civilized countries, it is illegal to threaten another person, because the law recognizes at least the effect that this sort of speech has, if not necessarily the entire theoretical framework built to try to understand this phenomenon. Where this gets interesting is when you take this idea of the performative action out of the material world of money and guns, and into the much squishier and more loosely organized world of social interactions. This is where most people tend to balk, because it's where things get messy, so before I launch into this segment let's get some further disclaimers out of the way:
What I'm about to talk about is heavily context-dependent and as such I don't think it makes any sense to enact legislation around it, as one thing the law is very bad at is making sense of context. (And that of course is beyond the fact that I just don't like federal legislation as a concept or practice in the first place.) Additionally, due to the heavily contextual nature of these ideas, I'm not advocating that any particular word should be considered universally unacceptable. If I say "faggot" right now in this blog post in a clinical, almost purely descriptive way, referencing the word itself rather than a particular person, obviously that is a context in which it is mostly harmless. There is of course always the possibility that someone reading this has a personal history with the word which is such that they'll be made to feel uncomfortable regardless of my usage or intent; but it doesn't necessarily make sense to build societal norms around edge cases. (That said, it does make total sense to build group norms around the needs of the people in the group, so if you're friends with anyone who's uncomfortable with any usage of a particular word I would strongly advise to indulge them.)
What I'm suggesting is that people should think about the context in which they are saying things, and what the effects of those statements might be, and weigh these possibilities carefully, because if speech is used in a reckless manner it can have the performative effect of suppressing other people's speech.
And now it's time to get into my concrete example, because without it that last claim probably looks pretty weird to anyone who's in the position I was in several months ago.
This particular example is one I'm intimately familiar with, because it's one that I'm currently living myself. For a bit over a year now, I've been working at a particular factory which shall remain nameless for the sake of my privacy; Last January, a few months into working at said factory, I came to the realization that I would prefer to live as a woman, and decided to transition. As of yet, I'm not on HRT, as I'm waiting for my medical insurance to kick in at the start of 2020, and in my general offline life I've only come out to my immediate family and my roommate; from the perspective of my coworkers, I'm just another guy. I haven't spoken about a great many aspects of myself in front of them, in fact; my leftist political leanings and my bisexuality are a couple other topics that I've consciously avoided around the workplace.
These are topics that my coworkers (whose names are changed in this post,) for their part, don't take any pains to avoid themselves; I'm quite familiar with their thoughts on politics and sexuality, having been unable to avoid overhearing them while in the break room on several occasions. In particular, one coworker, who can most accurately be described as "a fucking boomer," and who will be called "Harry" in this post, has spoken out quite vocally on several occasions while I was trying to enjoy my break, with some highlights being:
-In a portion of the conversation I was not privy to, Harry and a coworker reached the subject of gender segregated bathrooms and which ones transpeople (well, let's be honest, transwomen, as Harry, like most boomers, doesn't really seem to even be aware of the concept of transmen) should be allowed to use; after a short time on this topic, in which both agree that "men" (transwomen) shouldn't be allowed in the women's room, Harry opines that "the way I see it, there should be four bathrooms: Men, Women, Lesbians, and Fags."
-On a later occasion, Harry speaks, in shock, to a coworker, describing a television ad he saw the previous night, which depicts a gay couple, much to Harry's chagrin.
-One morning Harry walks in and, upon seeing my copy of Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith's "Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration" sitting on the break room table, remarks " 'Open Borders,' huh? Heh, sure, let all those fuckers in, I'll shoot every one of 'em."
-My team lead, who will be called Devin for this post, is browsing his facebook feed on his break and sees a post regarding hate speech legislation or some similar topic, at which point he looks toward Harry and asks if he's heard of this "hate speech" business, to which Harry replies he hasn't, at which point Devin explains that "hate speech means that if you say something the liberal media doesn't like, that means it's violence, and they can arrest you for it." Harry cuts in to suggest "Sure, let 'em try, I'll shoot all them faggots."
-While walking into the break room, I catch just the tail end of a conversation between Harry and another coworker, just hearing, out of context, Harry say "kill all them motherfuckers," to which the other coworker replies "hell yeah, fuckin' commies." I walk across the room and retrieve my copy of Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread from the cubby where I'd left it, and sit down to read for the duration of my break.
I'd like to assume that Harry is engaging in hyperbole for the sake of humor, indeed I sort of need to believe that he's not going to actually engage in violence toward me should he discover the fact that I currently have a boyfriend, or that I self-identify as a communist, or when my breasts start growing in after I start HRT. By the same token, I need to believe that should an altercation occur, my equally reactionary, equally anti-LGBT team lead will intervene on my behalf rather than simply allow this situation to play out, despite the fact that he's made no effort to intervene when this sort of explicitly violent rhetoric was being used in the break room. If I don't believe these things, it becomes untenable for me to continue working at my job, and working at my job needs to be tenable because I don't have any other option; my roommate and I share one car, so we can't work at two separate establishments, and neither of us makes enough to cover rent and utilities single-handedly, so we need to both work. I have no choice but to believe, at least to some degree, that Harry isn't actually as violent as he claims to be; at the same time, I'm not about to take chances. Hearing these things makes me uncomfortable, obviously, in fact it tends to ruin my break by making it impossible to relax, but I'm not about to argue back toward a man who will, completely unprovoked, express a desire to shoot people for being different to him on several axes along which I am decidedly different from him. I'm not about to approach Devin about it because I don't know how he'd respond to such a thing, given that he had no objections to such things being said to him in front of several other people in the break room. I don't feel comfortable going to HR about it in light of the fact that several months ago somebody else, "Steve" whom I barely know, decided to play a "prank" on a friend of his, "Ron," whom I also barely know, by telling Ron that I had complained to HR about him and gotten him fired, and Ron later mentioned offhandedly that he was planning on showing up to my house that night and beating me up, until Steve had revealed to him that it was a ruse.
All of this creates a particular context in which I think it would be extremely difficult to argue that my personal freedom of speech has not been severely curtailed by the context in which I exist; Not through legislation or even direct threats, I'm certainly free to say what I like while I'm at home, but at work I'm in an environment in which, due to the degree to which I am outnumbered by openly and explicitly intolerant people, who espouse violent views and desires without a second thought, there is an undeniable atmosphere of suppression toward people like myself; my beliefs, my experiences, and my identity are completely stifled by people who are by and large unaware that there is even anything there to stifle.
This is what people are talking about when they point out that certain speech acts have the effect of suppressing other speech acts; Openly espousing views that are denigrating toward marginalized groups can and will have the effect of silencing them, projecting the idea that it is unsafe for them to speak about themselves and their concerns. Now, to reiterate from the intro to this post, this isn't universal; in my discord group we throw around "faggot" like it's going out of style, because the people in that server are aware of the context in which I, a transwoman dating a man who I hooked up with before I decided to transition, am using the term. Obviously my friends know that when I call someone a faggot, my intent isn't to denigrate people who aren't straight, and that they have nothing to fear in speaking about their homosexual attractions and relationships in front of me, because I have created an environment in which that is common knowledge. It's a completely different context from my experience working in a factory staffed primarily by conservatives and reactionaries and hearing someone in the break room joke around about shooting faggots, commies, and immigrants.
Of course, these are two extreme scenarios. The more usual scenario is just being out in public, or on twitter; in which case, the context is that of society as a whole rather than the particular community the participants are living in. And in such cases, people like me are less likely to feel a direct threat to their well-being the way I do at work, but the historical treatment of various marginalized groups, indeed, the fact that they are marginalized, is very likely to have a chilling effect on their speech.
I'm not here to tell you that you can never say slurs, or make edgy jokes, or anything like that. What I am saying, is that the things you say can have a profound effect on the people around you, and that if you genuinely care about free speech for all, it would be hypocritical not to work toward societal norms that make these sorts of performative speech acts less acceptable in public. Say what you want among your friends in private, where you can easily control the context and ensure that your statements are understood the way you want them to be, but maybe cool it on twitter.
And the same goes to all the libs out there mocking people's freeze peach concerns. Consider the fact that a number of people are in positions where they have legitimate reason to be concerned for their freedom of speech, and that mocking them for it exacerbates that scenario, and that even in the case of people who have never really experienced being silenced, these sorts of jokes are more likely than not just going to help radicalize them toward conservatism. Don't be the sorts of jovially dismissive, smilingly cruel bullies that reactionaries like to pretend all of their opponents are. Reexamine the effects of your speech.
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