Put Down the Torch. Pick Up a Book

O n the subject of burning witches, C. S. Lewis shared an interesting observation. The problem with the anti-witch campaigns of yore was that the witch-hunters were wrong on the facts, not that they were wrong as a moral matter. If there had been people among us possessing occult powers that they used to kill their neighbors or to make them sick, causing the cows to go dry or the crops to fail, then it obviously would be the right thing to treat them as the very worst kind of criminals — as murderers, which is what they would be. The problem is that witches aren’t real — a matter of fact, not a matter of moral judgment.

One of the most important arguments for freedom of mind — the freedom that comprehends freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of inquiry, freedom of religion, etc. — is that the thought police are very likely to be wrong about things. Whether they are acting in the context of a free society or an unfree one, people who wield political power tend to reflect very strongly the prejudices of their time, their nation, their race, their class, their sex, their religion, their political party, etc. And we do not have to speculate about how things work out when new ideas — or new facts — encounter a political force invested with the power to suppress them: We have many examples in the historical record. Galileo was right and the Inquisition was wrong, but the Inquisition had the power to prohibit Galileo’s books, which might never have seen the light of day if not for the efforts of the heroes who smuggled his manuscripts out of Italy so that they could be published in Amsterdam.

Freedom of mind isn’t something that is good only in some abstract moral sense — it is something that has eminent practical value, too. Free markets outperform planned economies not simply because of incentives, as it is popularly supposed — Stalin could create extraordinarily powerful incentives without leaving his armchair — but because they enjoy an advantage in intelligence. In a free market, thousands or millions of people work, individually or in groups, on complex social problems, such as how to feed people or house them or move them from place to place. They try thousands of different things, most of which fail. But that failure is not a waste of energy or resources — it is the most direct route toward innovation and improvement, which is sometimes dramatic and radical but which is usually gradual and iterative. The process by which the horse-cart became the Mercedes EQ was one of evolution, not invention ex nihilo. But if you put a commissar with a five-year plan in charge of things, then his errors become universal and mandatory.

The free society works on similar principles in a more general way that is not limited to economic activity as such. (Although we should not underestimate how important economic freedom is to wider freedom: Freedom of the press does not mean very much without capital in the form of printing machinery, digital infrastructure, etc. That is why newspapers traditionally have been exempted from sales taxes in the free world — censorship may be implemented easily and effectively through policy that is, on its face, purely economic.) We allow for innovation and experimentation in matters great and small, even when that permits or positively encourages behaviors that the majority of society finds morally repugnant: Imagine, women working outside the home! Black children and white children attending the same schools! Men going around without any hats on! All of those would have been considered outside the main stream in fairly recent history. And the people who believed it was necessary to hang witches or to burn heretics were not radical outliers: They were the very foundation of respectable society. They were the experts and the leading minds of their time, and they were in the majority.

Of course, they were wrong. Majorities very often are.

Most often, what is in question is not an empirically provable hypothesis such as whether witches exist or whether the sun orbits the Earth. New York mayor Eric Adams seeks to prohibit posting certain rap videos on the Internet because he believes, without much evidence, that these are a cause of violent crime rather than the musical expression of certain underlying cultural realities associated with violent crime. There is a possibility that he is right about that, but there is also the possibility (stronger, in my view) that he is wrong about that. In the United States, our Constitution and our political culture do not give mere politicians the power to suppress speech, including speech in rhyme. Partly, free speech is a matter of human dignity, but it is also a pragmatic matter: The mayor of New York may be an idiot and a philistine (there are precedents), and there is no good reason to use the law to make his errors everybody’s errors. Perhaps you see no value in drill rap. It is worth keeping in mind that there was a time, not long ago, when most people would have laughed at the proposition that there was any artistic merit in any hip-hop music, or rock ’n’ roll music before that, or jazz before that. Before that, Stravinsky was controversial. Mozart, too: Così fan tutte was once considered immoral and was performed mostly in censored versions for years.

The point isn’t that one day we are going to look back on the works of Chii Wittz as comparable to those of Mozart — the point is that people get this stuff wrong all the time.

There is practical value in extending freedom of speech — not just in a narrowly legal sense, but as a matter of general social liberality — even to ideas and beliefs that you believe very strongly to be wrong, even evil. Sometimes, campaigns against evil thoughts and words come with factual claims, explicit or implicit: If we don’t burn the heretics, God will send a plague; if people read Lolita, they’ll turn into pedophiles; if Tucker Carlson is allowed to speak on his television program, we’ll turn into a fascist country. Those claims often turn out to be wrong. They were wrong about the heretics, they were wrong about Lolita and Ulysses, Chuck Berry and Courbet — there’s a good chance that you’re wrong about the long-term impact of Tucker Carlson, too. It is just — just barely! — possible that Joe Rogan’s critics are right on the medical questions but entirely mistaken about how important it is to the well-being of the world that Rogan is wrong about them, that their hysteria and their hatred have led them into misjudgment and error.

Antisemitism is wrong and immoral, but we probably are better off in a world in which we don’t lock people up for antisemitic tweets. We are probably worse off in a world in which we treat some protesters differently from others because we don’t approve of their political views or who their friends are. The world is probably not much improved — and may be much harmed — when the righteous take a puritanical stance toward the views and associations of teenagers who work at Mojo Burrito. The New York Times would be better off if its staffers could endure reading the views of Senator Tom Cotton. The Atlantic would be better off if it weren’t edited and staffed by cowards. Yale would be better off if it were run by people who believe in intellectual freedom and who couldn’t be quite so easily bullied into betraying that with which they have been entrusted.

And as a further practical matter, it often is worth hearing from people who have awful views and ideas in order to understand what those are and where they come from. Some Muslims have terrible attitudes toward Jews; some Jews have terrible attitudes toward Muslims — and none of that hatred came out of nowhere. It is a positive good for us as a society that figures such as Louis Farrakhan and Slavoj Žižek have ready access to the public square — it is not as though their hideous ideas and the terrible things they stand for will simply go away if we keep them away from the electronic soapbox. And they might occasionally say something true or useful or worth hearing, in spite of themselves. I don’t think I would have thought very much of Malcolm X if I had met him in 1957, and I’m not sure I think much of him now, but I do think we are better off for his having written and said what he wrote and said, even though much of it was vicious.

And there are intellectual evils that thrive underground but wither in the sunlight. Listening to people is very often the first step in rescuing them from their errors and their hatred.

Free speech and freedom of mind, if we understand them properly, should be rooted in intellectual humility. It is possible — it is certain — that some of the things we believe are wrong, be those matters of fact, matters of moral judgment, or estimates of the dangers posed by words and ideas that offend us. Be honest with yourself: If you had been present at the trials of Galileo, and everything you knew or had ever known pointed to his being in the wrong — the evidence of your eyes and all common human experience, the views of the most learned men and trusted of your community, every book on the subject you’d ever heard of, the proclamations of both church and state — do you think you would have made the right call? And that was, in a sense, an easy question — a question of fact that could be answered with mathematics and observation.

If you think that you do not have it in you to hang a witch or to burn a heretic, you’re probably wrong about that, too.

This is, unhappily, a lesson that needs to be relearned anew each generation, like the ravages of inflation, the risks of public debt, and the true price of war. Sometimes, forgetting why we cherish intellectual freedom leads to ordinary tyranny. In our case, it is more likely to deepen the soft, self-imposed tyranny into which our decadent democracies seem intent on falling. But John Milton figured it out in his time, as James Madison did in his. And we might figure it out in our own time, too, if anybody could be bothered to take five minutes to think about the question.

Put down the torch. Pick up a book.