Currently here in colorful Colorado there is a house bill proposed by Senator Kerry Donovan (D) which is looking to set up a digital communications division and commission. House Bill 132, if passed, will require digital communications platforms in Colorado to register with this division. Failure to do so would carry a fine of $5,000 per day. The purpose of the commission will be to investigate “unfair or discriminatory digital communications practices on the platform.” What are these unfair discriminatory practices? I’ll tell you, but I bet you could guess: hate speech, dissemination of misinformation, conspiracy theories or undermining election integrity – all the high-fructose corn syrup ingredients of a totalitarian Hot Pocket.
Of course, in response to this there is the usual bristling of conservatives decrying the doom of free speech. They are not wrong. The bill would have enough clout to muzzle any digital platform fomenting “hate speech,” but contains definitions so amorphous they could be squashed into any meaning. Floppy definitions are intentional.
But something has been pestering me about freedom of speech, like that popcorn skin stuck between molars that you can’t stop tonguing. It is where the emphasis is placed.
We place emphasis on the freedom of speech, making it clear that every human ought to have the freedom to express their thoughts. But anyone at any time can go out into a field and pour out their heart to the dregs, the only audience a cloud of butterflies silently applauding with their wings, and nobody cares because there is nobody there to hear. Conflicts about what is said only becomes an issue when there are others around to hear. This is too obvious to need mentioning, but it is also key to understanding the underlying principle of the freedom of speech. There is an important difference between freedom of speech and freedom of speech.
Let’s backup a moment and speak about speech. What is it in itself? Speaking is communication. Communication is the transfer of information between two or more persons. This information can be about the weather, who is picking up the kids from soccer practice, who will cover the check, whatever. But these are valence level facts. If speech was merely dealing with these externalities, there would be no problems. It is when we share our thoughts, beliefs, and experiences – when we share ourselves – that people pucker up. When I speak, I am sharing myself, as it were, with another being, whether that is God, a friend or an opponent.
We have a fancy word for sharing ourselves with other beings through communication: relationship. Relationship is communication. Any relationship in life, whether healthy, unhealthy, superficial or deep, reflects the status of communication between the parties. There is an intimate reciprocity between relationship and communication so that you can determine the health of one by means of the other.
This choice that I make to dig up that core stuff that makes me me and share it with another person is my anteing up to be in a relationship with them. What I choose to bring up may be good, bad, right, wrong or otherwise, but they are the complex ingredients of the batter which make me. When I speak my thoughts, I am speaking myself into the world. Which is why the quote from Jordan Peterson in the meme above is vital. The ultimate slavery is to have your words locked up in your mind, cut off from relationships, with sentinels posted at the corners of your mouth. It is to be a non-entity in this world, to lack identity, and to eliminate from the face of the land the Image of God in which we were created – one that exists in relationship.
It is only through relationship, through communication, that anyone changes or grows. Let me say that again. Humans never grow or change outside of the context of relationship, apart from communication. It is through relationships we understand to sympathize with others’ situations, correct our misjudgements, learn new ideas, and allow ourselves to be known. This all happens – only happens – through communication, through speech.
This is the real danger to putting limits on free speech and the reason why the founding fathers wisely hammered into the steel this fundamental experience of humans to be in a relationship. When limits are put on the freedom to communicate yourself to other beings, the result is the loss of relationships, the loss of the means by which any of us change or grow or come to understand the perspective of another and, ultimately, the snipping of the ties that bind a country together.
Yell your opinion to the daisies in the meadow, startle the prairie dogs, babble to the brook, no one cares. It is only through communicating yourself to another being in the context of a relationship which has the potential to offend. The limitation of speech is the limitation of relationship, further consigning the individual into a bubble, unchanging and unchangeable, cut off from the minds of all others. The freedom of speech is fundamentally the freedom to be in a relationship.
Thought Butter 