By: Cameron MacKenzie
I was in line for coffee the other day and saw a buddy of mine who does stand-up comedy. We got on the topic of political correctness, which, I told him in my scolding school-marm voice, “is destroying comedy.” At that point another guy in line turned around, looked at both of us and said, in deep seriousness, “But it is.”
I get it that a lot of people feel like there’s stuff that needs to be said, that there’s a new and powerful censor that’s shutting down topics that were previously fair game. But I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone with wi-fi that we aren’t living in a straight-jacketed era of the thought-police. Quite the opposite. There are a multitude of viewpoints on any topic available for anyone to peruse and, thanks to social media, a platform on which to blast them around the world. So why do some people feel like they’re not allowed to speak, or they’re not being heard, when we’re being encouraged to speak all day long?
Twitter supports all sides in various political, religious, and cultural debates, while Facebook opens its pages to all comers, be they cat-lady librarians or nefarious multi-national cadres masquerading as cat-lady librarians. While the rest of the internet has turned into clickbait, social media has become the pure medium of interpersonal connectivity. We can say whatever we like, as much as we like, to whomever we like, and we do. But for some reason, for many people, it just doesn’t feel like it’s enough. All of this freedom doesn’t feel like freedom at all.
Kant wrote something about this 300 years ago, right about the time when the notion that everybody had something important to say was just getting off the ground. He starts off his essay “What is Enlightenment?” by saying that everyone has the potential to be enlightened, but that few people ever exercise it. Few people question the church about God, or the government about policy. But you should, Kant says. You should work to find out the answers for yourself. You need to go out and do the reading and the research.
But while it’s nice for individuals to be enlightened, Kant thinks it’s even more important for the “public” to be enlightened, and the public gets enlightened through the exercise of its freedom of expression. People, in short, need to be able to argue in public about things they disagree with. If you’re a soldier and you’ve got a problem with foreign policy, that means you should debate the merits of that policy. If you’re the garbageman and you think garbage needs to be collected differently, then you need to go public and make that known. Only through open and public debate can any change occur.
I love Kant. You pick him up and he’s almost always clear, and sensible, and refreshing. Like a brisk pep talk from a boss who’s got a lot on his plate.
But what Kant doesn’t say here about the freedom of expression--what he thinks is so obvious that it doesn’t even need to be said--is that this freedom is limited. If you’ve got a problem with the church and you’re a priest, then you can debate about the church. But if you’ve got a problem with the church and you’re a doctor, you need to sit down and shut up. If you’re a soldier, you can debate military policy, but if you’re a baker, you need to stick to bread. Stay in your lane, is what Kant’s saying, which made a lot of sense in 1700’s Prussia.
When Kant’s talking about the space of public debate, he’s talking about newspapers, journals, and books, but how many people in the Prussian Empire knew how to read, much less write? How many people could write and had access to the editors of publications? How many people who could do all of these things were intelligent and interesting enough to get their writings published? These boundaries just don’t exist today. And in some ways that’s great. You can be a genius lawnmower repairman in a backwater and have the same reach as the mediocre blowhard from Harvard who lives in Manhattan. But in other ways it’s profoundly dangerous. This infinitely expanding pool of information, where everybody gets a say about everything, has begun to devalue what’s written. It dilutes what’s expressed. All this communication is killing communication.
And so today we can write whatever we like and publish it for, literally, the entire world to see, from Tokyo to Tahoe, every second of every day. And yet we feel as though we aren’t being heard, and that’s because the importance of what we have to say diminishes with every single thing that’s said until nothing has any weight anymore, because no one, really, is listening. Everyone is just waiting for their turn to talk.
Kant gives us, I think, two ways out.
1: Appeal to the sovereign.
Kant says that the whole point of public debate is to empower the public to address the sovereign. Through the course of debate, the public unifies behind a set of ideas that they then present to the sovereign, because it is he and he alone who can change the state of affairs. For Kant, that means the people can address the king. But we don’t have a king anymore, so we address elected officials who can change policy. That sounds nice, and it sounded nice in seventh grade civics class but, as is glaringly obvious, politics simply don’t work that way.
The sovereign that must be addressed by the public is, I think, the entity that allows the speaking; the group that provides the space for the public. That’s social media itself. That’s Zuckerberg and Dorsey and Sergei et al. But address them in order to say what? Cut back our freedom of expression? Take us back in time? Find a new way to do this social media you’re doing? It’s just not in their interest to do so. We can’t force people to “stay in their lane.”
The other option is:
2: Not the public, but the personal.
Kant emphasizes the freedom of the public because he believes an empowered public is capable of changing things. But we’ve got a situation now where the public is so empowered it’s distracted, and anxious, and depressed. You and me can’t fix that--we can’t fix the public, we can only fix ourselves.
I think if we look back at the very first thing Kant says about freedom--personal freedom--we can see a way forward.
Personal freedom, Kant says, isn’t about expressing yourself, it’s about taking the time and the effort to educate yourself, to listen more, to read everything you can get your hands on from the experts in the field. Personal freedom isn’t about the freedom to regurgitate opinions for the sake of making noise; it’s about identifying and exploring what is important to you.
And, Kant might add if he were with us today, if you really feel like you’re not being heard, you might want to ask yourself exactly how many people you need to listen.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.