There is a common misconception that society pays a heavy
price for allowing free speech – emotional harm to members of target groups,
leakage of national security secrets, stuff like that. In truth, the substantial
positives deriving from vigorous free speech are pretty clear, while the negatives
are highly speculative and usually ideologically driven.
An item in
today’s The Boston Globe tells us an
awful lot about one enormous societal advantage of allowing free speech. Globe staffer Bryan Bender reports
that for over a year a “Burlington-based Internet company hosted a website that
taught its members how to outfit a suicide bomber” and other ugly lessons. Some national security fanatics are
screaming about this, including a fellow named Yigal Carmon, a former Israeli
military intelligence officer and founder of the Middle East Media Research
Institute in Washington,
who decries “the damage they are causing.”
But the Department of Homeland
Security and various American intelligence agencies see the web site as a blessing. They’ve determined that in most cases
it’s “preferable to keep such sites operating as a way of tracking the spread
of radical Islam, rather than try to quell them one by one.” Besides, says these government agencies, if
these sites are taken down – assuming it would be constitutional to do so – the
radicals will “just find another host.”
So, at
least someone in the American intelligence community recognizes that one
benefit of allowing free speech is that it helps us know who hates us enough to
call for violence against us. It’s like a gay student leader, undergraduate
Jason Shepard, said in a speech that I heard him deliver a decade ago at the University of Wisconsin, where the Faculty Senate was
debating whether to repeal the campus speech code that banned, among other
things, speech denigrating gay students. Shepard pointed out to the would-be
censors on the faculty that while he did not particularly enjoy being called “a
queer,” he found it useful to know who viewed him that way, so that he knew on
whom not to turn his back. Precisely!
The Shepard speech led the Faculty
Senate to repeal the faculty’s speech code, the only example of which I’m aware
where a faculty repealed, rather than installed, a speech code. The full story
is told by Professor Donald Alexander Downs in his fascinating 2005 book, Restoring
Free Speech and Liberty on Campus (The Independent Institute).