Debating Speech

Debating Hate Speech, following "When is hate speech violence"

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When Is Speech Violence?By LISA FELDMAN BARRETT JULY 14, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/opinion/sunday/when-is-speech-violence.html?smid=tw-shar

Imagine that a bully threatens to punch you in the face. A week later, he walks up to you and breaks your nose with his fist. Which is more harmful: the punch or the threat?
The answer might seem obvious: Physical violence is physically damaging; verbal statements aren’t. “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

But scientifically speaking, it’s not that simple. Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain — even kill neurons — and shorten your life.

Your body’s immune system includes little proteins called proinflammatory cytokines that cause inflammation when you’re physically injured. Under certain conditions, however, these cytokines themselves can cause physical illness. What are those conditions? One of them is chronic stress.

Your body also contains little packets of genetic material that sit on the ends of your chromosomes. They’re called telomeres. Each time your cells divide, their telomeres get a little shorter, and when they become too short, you die. This is normal aging. But guess what else shrinks your telomeres? Chronic stress.

If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?

This question has taken on some urgency in the past few years, as professed defenders of social justice have clashed with professed defenders of free speech on college campuses. Student advocates have protested vigorously, even violently, against invited speakers whose views they consider not just offensive but harmful — hence the desire to silence, not debate, the speaker. “Trigger warnings” are based on a similar principle: that discussions ofcertain topics will trigger, or reproduce, past trauma — as opposed to merely challenging or discomfiting the student. The same goes for “microaggressions.”

This idea — that there is often no difference between speech and violence — has stuck many as a coddling or infantilizing of students, as well as a corrosive influence on the freedom of expression necessary for intellectual progress. It’s a safe bet that the Pew survey datareleased on Monday, which showed that Republicans’ views of colleges and universities have taken a sharp negative turn since 2015, results in part from exasperation with the “speech equals violence” equation.

The scientific findings I described above provide empirical guidance for which kinds of controversial speech should and shouldn’t be acceptable on campus and in civil society. In short, the answer depends on whether the speech is abusive or merely offensive.

Offensiveness is not bad for your body and brain. Your nervous system evolved to withstand periodic bouts of stress, such as fleeing from a tiger, taking a punch or encountering an odious idea in a university lecture.

Entertaining someone else’s distasteful perspective can be educational. Early in my career, I taught a course that covered the eugenics movement, which advocated the selective breeding of humans. Eugenics, in its time, became a scientific justification for racism. To help my students understand this ugly part of scientific history, I assigned them to debate its pros and cons. The students refused. No one was willing to argue, even as part of a classroom exercise, that certain races were genetically superior to others.

So I enlisted an African-American faculty member in my department to argue in favor of eugenics while I argued against; halfway through the debate, we switched sides. We were modeling for the students a fundamental principle of a university education, as well as civil society:When you’re forced to engage a position you strongly disagree with, you learn something about the other perspective as well as your own. The process feels unpleasant, but it’s a good kind of stress — temporary and not harmful to your body — and you reap the longer-term benefits of learning.

What’s bad for your nervous system, in contrast, are long stretches of simmering stress. If you spend a lot of time in a harsh environment worrying about your safety, that’s the kind of stress that brings on illness and remodels your brain. That’s also true of a political climate in which groups of people endlessly hurl hateful words at one another, and of rampant bullying in school or on social media. A culture of constant, casual brutality is toxic to the body, and we suffer for it.

That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.

On the other hand, when the political scientist Charles Murray argues that genetic factors help account for racial disparities in I.Q. scores, you might find his view to be repugnant and misguided, but it’s only offensive. It is offered as a scholarly hypothesis to be debated, not thrown like a grenade. There is a difference between permitting a culture of casual brutality and entertaining an opinion you strongly oppose. The former is a danger to a civil society (and to our health); the latter is the lifeblood of democracy.

By all means, we should have open conversations and vigorous debate about controversial or offensive topics. But we must also halt speech that bullies and torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, is the author of “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.”

“‘Hate Speech’ and Incitement to Violence”

Given the evils of hate, any argument for protecting is, at best, an uphill effort and, at worst, simply misguided. Many people either accept or, at least, wonder whether they should accept, an argument that goes something like this: Anyone sensitive to the horror of genocide knows that hate pervades the atmosphere at such times. Few goals can rank higher than preventing genocide and the murderous racial conflicts presented to the world during the twentieth century. Moreover, it is difficult to find any value in the freedom to engage in racist hate speech. Important but ultimately less significant values such as free speech cannot, for any sensitive person, lead to any pause in outlawing the speech that contributes to these horrors. Whether or not the ban will be effective in even a few cases at preventing genocide or racial violence, the mere possibility that it will more than justifies the ban. As an advocate of almost absolute protection of free speech, I should explain the grounds for my valuation of free speech and rejection of the above claim. That explanation, it turns out, is too ambitious for this essay. Nevertheless, Part I describes but does not defend a theory of why racist or hate speech should be protected – a theory that I believe provides the best, though often unrecognized, explanation of existing American case law but one that is surely a controversial, probably minority, view even in the United States. Most readers will realize, as do I, that these theoretical grounds do not really answer my imagined proponent of regulation. Thus, Part II describes the empirical evidence that would cause me to abandon the theory described in Part I, at least in the context of some category of racist or hate speech, but then gives reasons to doubt that this evidence will be forthcoming. In the end, this essay is more a call for more knowledge – I stand ready to be shown that the relevant evidence overrides my doubts about the efficacy of suppression. But given the inevitable empirical uncertainties in evaluating such evidence, Part II does not answer the last sentence of the imagined argument for regulation set forth above about the mere possibility of making a contribution toward prevention. Thus, the final part of this essay offers a different answer: it considers reasons to expect, as a practical matter, that hate speech regulation is more likely to contribute to genocidal events and major events of racial violence than to reduce them. These historical horrors help justify, or so I suggest, greater protection for speech. My hypothesis is that the empirical investigation supports the gamble that strong speech Baker - hate speech - protection leads to better results. 

https://www.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/law-culture/files/hate-speech-files/Hate-Speech-C-Edwin-Baker.pdf