Censorship? Unfettered Expression? How About Neither?
It is okay that some ideas are never shared.
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“When a class discussion goes poorly for me,” writes University of Virginia senior Emma Camp in a recent New York Times article, “I can tell.” She relates the story of advancing a controversial opinion during a feminist theory class in her sophomore year. The idea didn’t go over well.
The room felt tense. I saw people shift in their seats. Someone got angry, and then everyone seemed to get angry. After the professor tried to move the discussion along, I still felt uneasy. I became a little less likely to speak up again and a little less trusting of my own thoughts.
According to Camp, this is an epidemic on college campuses. She cites a 2021 survey in which 80 percent of students self-censor at least some of the time. Forty-eight percent of undergraduates described themselves as “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” during classroom discussions. At Camp’s own college, 57 percent of students feel that way.
This is a consequence of several trends. One is the increased sensitivity toward all genders, races, and levels of ability (what conservatives would deride as “wokeness”). Another is social media-based cancel culture. Still another is the efforts of some districts to eliminate certain books and topics from school curricula.
Censorship is, of course, sickening. Everyone should be free to discuss their perspectives without the interference of people in power. However, that is not what happens in Camp’s anecdote. What she describes is a situation that stand-up comics are all-too familiar with: saying something for which you expect laughs or hell yeses but hearing crickets in response.
That isn’t censorship. It’s the marketplace of ideas working exactly as it should.
I teach writing to college freshmen. For one assignment, I have my students write about something they disagree with or that makes them mad. One student, Mary, wrote about being a white woman who has a Black boyfriend. The crux of the essay was a confrontation with Mary’s Aunt Patty, a “very conservative and opinionated person,” who told Mary that
being in an interracial relationship creates problems within families and that the Bible says that we as Christians are to be “equally yoked” within a relationship.
My students often write on contentious topics: abortion, gun control, racism. I teach them, when they are crafting an argument, to “plant a naysayer” — i.e., acknowledge, and then rebut, opposing viewpoints. When my students use this tactic, they tend to include the same qualifier. They use it so often, it has become a cliché. Mary used it three times in her three-page essay:
- “Everyone has a right to their opinion.”
- “Every person has rights and can believe whatever they choose.”
- “Although my Aunt Patty can believe whatever she wants . . .”
As I read each phrase, I wanted to scream. So, apparently, did Mary.
- “I bit my tongue so hard I thought I was going to bite it in half.”
- “I have never been angrier in my life.”
- “[I]t makes me incredibly frustrated that my own family criticizes something that is not hurting anyone, and even more importantly, that makes me happy.”
We live in an America where everyone thinks their notions are faultless. They’ll fight you if you contradict them, but contradict them we do. Usually, the discord is silly, as there is a kernel of acceptability in most beliefs.
Except Aunt Patty’s. Views like hers are tasteless. Irresponsible. Damaging. Not just wrong but wholly, heart-and-soul, what-the-hellishly wrong. Racism is only one type. There are others, muddying our collective consciousness like meltwater.
Why would Mary defend their existence? Why would anyone?
Google “entitled to opinion,” and you’ll get over 300,000 hits. The phrase is the subject of essays from philosophers to radio hosts to mommy bloggers. Legendary newscaster David Brinkley played on the phrase with his 1997 book Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinion. The phrase has an Urban Dictionary entry. It has a Wikipedia page.
Yet I see it as a phatic expression, an empty phrase said reflexively to serve a social function, like “How are you?” or “Let’s get together sometime.” Logically, it cannot be true that all opinions are equally valid. Jamie Whyte says that “insisting that you are entitled to your opinion cannot possibly give you any proper advantage in a debate.” Patrick Stokes sees a moral failure in the phrase:
The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like.”
Of course, no can be stopped from thinking whatever they like. There is a difference between thought and speech. Between opinion and expression. Between prejudice (Aunt Patty’s thoughts) and discrimination (Aunt Patty’s speech). Mary, with her insistence that “everyone has a right to their opinion,” seems to argue that Aunt Patty can think whatever she likes but does not need to say it. Saying it crosses a line. Not Whyte’s abstract line of debate protocol but the actions-have-consequences one.
A line whose crossing made Mary sick at heart and led to her blasting the old bat in front of a stranger — me — several months later.
In theory, the think-but-don’t-say approach should work. We can only judge others by their actions, and if they don’t act badly, their opinions will stay cloaked.
Trouble is, people can’t keep odious opinions to themselves.
For one thing, they no longer have to. The last few years have seen to that with Twitter hot takes, combative press conferences, U.S. Representatives heckling the president during the State of the Union Address, and nearly every utterance from Donald Trump.
Second, Americans prize free speech more highly than most Western societies. It’s part of our Enlightenment roots. Even when a truth is monstrously painful, the worse sin for some of us (I’m looking at you, Tucker Carlson) is having to keep mum about that truth.
We can have a free society while still observing reasonable limits on expression. Opinions like Aunt Patty’s are what those limits are meant to exclude. They are like the One Ring, the Elder Wand, the Ark of the Covenant: too destructive to be wielded responsibly. No one has a valid claim, title, or guarantee to those beliefs.
No one, in short, is entitled to them.
Back to the story of Emma Camp.
If there had been value in whatever idea she espoused in that University of Virginia classroom, someone would have taken her side. Despite the threat of cancel culture, someone would have come to her defense. Maybe two or three someones, maybe more. And then the type of class discussion she longer for might have occurred.
Her complaint, in other words, is that she didn’t get the benefit of the “everyone’s entitled to their opinion” fallacy.
It isn’t a problem that this is the case. As we know from Aunt Patty plus far too many others, some ideas don’t deserve to be stated. They aren’t worthy of debate. The problem is when a person in power chooses the ideas that are worthy.
When the masses decide, that’s simply market forces, just as when Blockbuster went out of business or McDonald’s Arch Deluxe failed.
Bottom line: censorship sucks. So does unfettered expression (a.k.a., anarchy). The sweet spot, like most sweet spots, lies somewhere in the middle.
