I acknowledge that the tendency of all opinions to become sectarian is not cured by the freest discussion, but is often heightened and exacerbated thereby; the truth which ought to have been, but was not, seen, being rejected all the more violently because proclaimed by persons regarded as opponents. But it is not on the impassioned partisan, it is on the calmer and more disinterested bystander, that this collision of opinions works its salutary effect. Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil: there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood...
while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them. For the interest, therefore, of truth and justice, it is far more important to restrain this employment of vituperative language than the other; … It is, however, obvious that law and authority have no business with restraining either, while [public] opinion ought, in every instance, to determine its verdict by the circumstances of the individual case; condemning every one, on whichever side of the argument he places himself, in whose mode of advocacy either want of candor, or malignity, bigotry or intolerance of feeling manifest themselves, but not inferring these vices from the side which a person takes…; and giving merited honor to every one, whatever opinion he may hold, who has calmness to see and honesty to state what his opponents and their opinions really are, exaggerating nothing to their discredit, keeping nothing back which tells, or can be supposed to tell, in their favor. This is the real morality of public discussion. J.S. Mill On Liberty, Chapter 2.
Teaching an author is often the best antidote against underestimating them. While thanks to Jill Gordon's classic article I already knew that Mill really did not hold (despite Wikipedia's claim to the contrary) to the 'marketplace of ideas' with the truth emerging from free competition of ideas, I had, however, always assumed that Mill does have a kind of strange providential faith in the effects of freedom speech. But I now see that's mistaken; there is a sense that for Mill free speech is the least worst alternative. I do not deny that for Mill there are genuine goods that may sometimes come from free speech ("truth and justice"), but on the whole his analysis is unlike contemporary free speech absolutists, clear-sighted on the dangers of free speech (more about this below). His real analysis focuses on the evils that follow from suppression of free speech -- no surprise given the significance of the harm principle in his thought (recall)--; and, in fact, the greatest political harm done by suppression is the removal of "hope."
Mill is not entirely explicit on why political hope matters; but a moment's reflection reminds one that the existence of political hope (in a person/population) prevents people from resorting to violence. And Mill's approach to free speech is informed by his aversion to violence (and the harm principle). Political hope is also, I think, the key political reason to have regular competitive elections: this allows, in principle, no political issue to be settled forever and allows the politically defeated time to reconsider and re-articulate their views and develop new coalitions (a version of this point was made yesterday in Dutch by my former colleague Annelien De Dijn).
I do not mean to deny that Mill's approach to free speech is informed by his anti-paternalistic doctrine of individual sovereignty or "independence" directed at government regulations and censorship ("legal penalties") and community standards (he is very concerned about the (“moral coercion of public opinion;” recall here and here). But he is remarkably frank about the political dangers of unfettered free speech. By this I do not mean the familiar thought that some free speech is directly dangerous because it is incitement to violence or armed revolution.
Rather, I mean, first, Mill's recognition that free speech is a contributing cause to fanaticism and partisanship and free speech is itself unable to reduce these ("the tendency of all opinions to become sectarian is not cured by the freest discussion, but is often heightened and exacerbated thereby.") It follows from this insight that in the context of very polarized societies -- that is, where there are few indifferent bystanders -- one should not expect many positive effects from free speech. (It's not a suggestion to censor speech because that may, in fact, cause a civil war.)
Second, the other clear danger that Mill recognizes is that one can use mere speech to silence others (without any threat of actual violence). Invective and vitriol, extremely harsh language ("unmeasured vituperation"), when on the side of existing dogma, successfully silences others. This suggests that the contemporary guardians of civility are not all wrong, but they (the civility guardians) tend to ignore, in practice, that the threat to speech arises only when incivility is joined to power and that the deployment of civility in the service of power is also a means of silencing (recall this classic piece by Johnson/Kazarian; and my evolving responses, especially those in response to Bejan's book and in response to Srinivasan's account of anger in politics).
Interestingly enough when faced with the problem of silencing, Mill wishes to develop a non-legal moral solution--one that relies on situational judgments by public opinion. Real impartial spectators are meant to judge and carefully adjudicate when invective is in the service of existing dogma and power (and then denounce it, etc.). Obviously, this is impossible in heavily polarized societies (where who has the power and who is being silenced unfairly are themselves heavily contested and bad faith abounds). But by Mill's lights such public morality is also unlikely to work in even non-polarized societies.* And the reason for this is that according to Mill the general tendency of public opinion is itself conformist (that's really the lesson of chapter 3 of On Liberty). So, by Mill's lights public opinion cannot provide the solution here because if it has an interest in public morality at all, it is heavily status quo biased.
The point-scoring-professional-philosopher in me wants to say to Mill, gotcha. But, in fact, it says something of Mill's recognition of the depth of the problem of silencing that he offers a manifest (by his own lights) imperfect solution: the real morality of public discussion. That is to say, the problem of silencing is still with us (and with modern technologies quite visibly so),** and to the best of my knowledge nobody has figured out how to develop a solution to it which isn't a worse evil.
*There is also a further problem that who has power and who is silencing may differ locally and nationally/globally. Jacob T. Levy has been very good at developing Mill's ideas about local sources of oppression (recall), and more generally Shklar's liberalism of fear.
**I thank Sara Bernstein for really alerting me to it years ago.
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