From the Archives: Attacks on free speech provoke author Jonathan Rauch to defend 'liberal science'

Attacks on free speech provoke author Jonathan Rauch to defend 'liberal science'
November 30, 2013 10:17 PM MST


Twenty years after it was first published, a new, expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought is now available as an ebook, with an ink-and-paper edition coming out in March 2014.

Jonathan Rauch, the author of Kindly Inquisitors and other books (including Demosclerosis and his 2013 memoir, Denial: My 25 Years without a Soul), spoke recently with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner following a panel discussion on freedom of speech at the Cato Institute. He explained what inspired him to write the book in the first place.

When, in the late 1980s, “Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses and received a fatwa (essentially a death sentence) from Ayatollah Khomeini,” he said, “I thought that the West did not know how to respond to that. It could defend the laws of free speech but it wasn't defending the ideas of free speech. People were saying things like, 'Well, a death sentence on Rushdie is certainly offensive and wrong but Rushdie himself was offensive to Muslims,' and so forth. And I realized that a lot of people didn't understand why we have this idea of letting people say offensive stuff.”

What is 'liberal science'?
One of the concepts Rauch introduces in Kindly Inquisitors is what he calls “liberal science.”

He explained that “most discussions of free thought and speech start and end with the U.S Constitution” but he tries “to go a little deeper and look at society's method for producing knowledge and adjudicating disputes about fact, which is in some ways the most important thing we do” – for instance, disagreements about whether Christianity or Islam is “the right religion.”

Historically, he said, the method of “settling disputes like that was war.”

By contrast, “liberal science substitutes an open-ended, rule-based, social process in which everybody throws out ideas all the time and we subject them to criticism. We kill our hypotheses rather than each other. This turns out both to be spectacularly good at mobilizing intellectual talent to find and promote good ideas and spectacularly good at defusing what otherwise would be political, often violent, conflicts.”

Liberal science, he said, is the term he coined “for the whole intellectual network we have that seeks truth in Western liberal cultures.”

He compares it to two other major social institutions for “allocating resources and adjudicating social conflicts.”

In economics, he said, “market systems are in the business of allocating resources and they use open-ended rules of exchange to do that.”

In politics, he noted, “democracies are in the business of allocating coercive political power and they use the exchange of votes and compromise to do that.”

Parallel to those two systems, he added, “liberal science is in the business of adjudicating questions about who's right and wrong and they use the exchange of criticism.”

These three systems, Rauch explained, “all have in common that it shouldn't matter who you are. Anyone can participate, there's no special authority, and no one gets the final say. No one can stand outside the system and say, 'Here's the final result.'”

The result is “always subject to change. It's a big rolling social consensus.”

Retreat of the ideologues
Since Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, there has been a major, positive change in the intellectual environment, Rauch said.

“In the last twenty years there's been a retreat by active ideologues who favored censorship and speech controls,” he said. Those views have “been replaced with a more refined case that focuses more specifically on how minorities can be hurt when hate speech rises to a certain level of prevalence in society. It's called the 'hostile environment doctrine.'”

In preparing the new edition of his book, Rauch “decided to take a really hard look at that because I think it's right now the biggest and most serious challenge to people like me who advocate very robust freedom of speech.”

He wanted to find out, “from a minority point of view, which is better: a wide open system where people are free to say hateful things about me and often do, or a more controlled system where you've got some people in charge trying to protect me from that?”

His conclusion, “based on the history of the last twenty years for gay rights” is that “there's no contest. We're much better off as minorities when our speech and the other side's speech are [both] protected because we win those arguments, and we're worse off when that process is interfered with.”

The expanded edition of Kindly Inquisitors includes a new foreword by syndicated columnist George F. Will and a new afterword by Jonathan Rauch. It is available now in both Nook and Kindle formats and a print version will be released next year by the University of Chicago Press.


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 30, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

The Libertarian Evolution of George F. Will

Reason magazine's current issue has a lengthy interview with conservative columnist George F. Will, conducted by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, authors of The Declaration of Independents.  Not yet on line, the article is headlined "George Will's Libertarian Evolution."

That's a title I thought of using myself recently (and you will see a variant above) when I saw Will's October 23 column that virtually endorsed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert Sarvis, running as a Libertarian Party nominee, and I remembered Will's 1992 column about Libertarian presidential candidate Andre Marrou, which in the Washington Post was headlined "Consider a Libertarian?; Get Serious."

(I should mention that, as a campaign advisor, I accompanied Marrou to the interview with George Will at his Georgetown office that preceded the publication of the column, and we both came away from it feeling positive and expecting, perhaps naively, great praise and even an endorsement.)

At the Post, that article is behind a paywall, but I found a copy on the Baltimore Sun's web site.  Here are some tidbits:

There hangs about [Marrou] the acrid aroma of strange incense burnt at silly altars. There is, in fact, some Lenin in the clanking rhetoric by which he expresses his encompassing ideology, his life in the familiar 20th-century abode, the well-lit prison of one idea.

The idea is that ''government power is opposed to individual liberty.'' Must we still debate such sophomoric notions? One's spirit sags at the prospect of plowing all the over-plowed intellectual ground from late-night college arguments, long ago when we smoked French cigarettes and thought Italian movies were deep. But plow we must.

So, here goes: Police and armies that keep bad people at bay, and roads that make practical the freedom to travel, and education that makes people competent for life in a free society, these are not ''opposed to individual liberty.'' Besides, liberty, although very important, is not the only value. There are also justice, domestic tranquillity and a good five-cent cigar.

The Libertarians' extremism (they oppose laws setting minimum drinking ages, or banning concealed weapons, or restricting immigration, and so on) makes them unelectable, so their extremism also makes them safe recipients of protest votes....

All of which makes the Libertarians' frivolousness especially regrettable. Once upon a time there were politically serious third parties -- Bob La Follette's Progressives, Norman Thomas' Socialists -- which, by working at the margins, expanded first the nation's political discussion and then the nation's agenda. No more.

By contrast, Will's latest foray into commentary on Libertarian candidates has more negative to say about the Republican and Democrat running against the LP candidate than about the Libertarian Sarvis, whom Will finds so attractive he includes the script of a pro-Sarvis TV ad:

During an intermission in the telecast of a notably disagreeable McAuliffe-Cuccinelli debate, viewers heard from their television sets a woman’s voice asking, “Can’t vote for these guys?” Then Sarvis’s voice:

“Like you, I can’t vote for Ken Cuccinelli’s narrow-minded social agenda. I want a Virginia that’s open-minded and welcoming to all. And like you, I don’t want Terry McAuliffe’s cronyism either, where government picks winners and losers. Join me, and together we can build a Virginia that’s open-minded and open for business.”

McAuliffe is an enthusiast for, and has prospered from, government “investments” in preferred industries, which is a recipe for crony capitalism. Cuccinelli is a stern social conservative, an opponent of, among other things, gay marriage. Marriage equality interests Sarvis (whose mother is Chinese) because his wife is African American, so his marriage would have been illegal in Virginia before the exquisitely titled 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia.

Earlier in the piece, Will noted:

The Democratic and Republican candidates, Terry McAuliffe and Ken Cuccinelli, each say that no good can come from electing the other fellow; Sarvis amiably agrees with both.

In Sarvis, the man and the moment have met. He is running at a time of maximum distrust of established institutions, including the two major parties. He has little money, but McAuliffe and Cuccinelli have spent millions of dollars on broadcast ads making each other repulsive to many Virginians, who surely feel as Will Rogers did: “You got to admit that each party is worse than the other.”

To be sure, Will doesn't predict Sarvis will win, but he recognizes the value of the vote as a message-bearing mechanism:

Third-party candidacies are said to be like bees — they sting, then die. Still, Sarvis is enabling voters to register dissatisfaction with the prevailing political duopoly. Markets are information-generating mechanisms, and Virginia’s political market is sending, through Sarvis, signals to the two durable parties.

One aspect of that signal is that Virginia voters want an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.

Robert Sarvis with Coy Barefoot

If Sarvis breaks the 10 percent vote threshold, the Libertarian Party will have official ballot status for the next four years, meaning the LPVA can nominate candidates the way the DPVA and RPV do, through caucuses and conventions (and even primaries), without going through the tedious, time-consuming, and expensive process of collecting petition signatures to get candidates' names on the ballot. Money that could instead go into voter education (TV and radio ads, direct-mail appeals, phone banking) now gets spent on ballot access.

For four years, if the LP is organized well enough to take advantage of its new status, Virginia Libertarians can spend money on campaigning rather than on petitioning.

Whether George Will explicitly knew about this aspect of Virginia election law is not really relevant. The fact that he recognized the Libertarian candidate as a torch-bearer for electoral choice as well as human liberty -- and that this represents a shift in his thinking over the past two decades -- is what I find significant.