We’ve made a faulty conclusion: that speaking isn’t acting. We couldn’t be more wrong. And unfortunately, that makes it more dangerous.
“For evil to succeed, all it needs is for good men to do nothing.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
On War and Words
What do we do with hate?
It’s frustrating that we can’t seem to deal with the problem of hate. It’s like we can all see the problem and yet feel powerless to stop it.
Most of our solutions get stuck in the hypothetical morass of logic. We don’t want to restrict speech and we don’t want to criminalize those who haven’t done anything real.
This, of course, is where things get messy. Particularly as so many of us can attest to the variety of ways words can manipulate and harm.
And this is our point of departure.
We want to sort our world.
Which means we need to figure out what bucket to throw this problem of words into.
When we talk about language, it’s clearly a question of free speech.
But when we talk about manipulation, then it’s clearly a harmful act.
So which bucket does hate speech go in?
Both, of course.
And that freaks us out.
Protecting free speech is necessary.
There is no question. And what has been an important part of American practice and jurisprudence has for years protected a more robust view of free speech than any other country in the world. Protection of this wide view on words has been unquestionably valuable.
But it is also dangerous when we think language only sits in a single bucket at a time.
Language is the foundation of law and how the law is subverted and twisted. We use words to lift each other up and tear each other down, inside and out. Whole populations are enslaved because of words and words punish crack cocaine users 13 times longer than powder cocaine users.
We also used words to make that very 13-times punishment a compromise. Before 2009, it was 100 times.
Abusers use words to break the will of their victims and raise children who are more likely to become abusers themselves.
The ways people exploit and destroy each other with words in tangible and intangible ways are countless.
And while protecting free speech is entirely necessary, we must also recognize the downside to protecting speech is also very much tangible.
Speaking is Acting.
Many of us have gotten pretty tired of hearing from politicians after every mass shooting that their thoughts and prayers are with the victims. It feels rote and reductive.
And to be honest, I don’t really believe that they are thinking about the victims, given how quickly they come to the defense of everyone else. Let’s not talk about guns right now, we need to protect gun owners…
But it also isn’t true to say “we don’t want thoughts and prayers, we want action.” Because they have acted. They tweeted. And apparently directed thoughts toward victims and included them in their prayers. This is literally what they are doing.
It amounts to an inept action, however; just barely more than nothing. It amounts to saying something but not really meaning it. Like telling your beloved how much you love them but only when they’re mad at you and only in public tweets.
In this case, speaking is a completely inept action. So consequently, if we recognize that these words are active, but inexcusably weak, we might help get the action we actually want from them.
Very different is the rhetoric of hate, as it is entirely more active speech.
Peddlers of hate are actively pitching violent ideology to willing customers. These individuals form organizations, build media, and spread concepts with real world consequences. These aren’t just words they are using; they are intending for the rhetoric to become reality.
They speak on television and write books full of vile and bloodthirsty rhetoric. They argue for people to take “2nd Amendment solutions” and (literally) “target” politicians.
When an adult shoots up an Amish school, it is unsurprising to find his bookshelf full of right-wing propaganda and the young man who shot up the Charleston church was flooded with Neo-Naziism. These words they heard weren’t nothing. Hate speech calling for genocide isn’t inactive.
Or the gaslighting which keeps victims of abuse in marriages and children under the care of monstrous parents. These words aren’t just words, like the idea of a word is ephemeral and dissipates into the ether. Words impact the flesh and can traumatize the body.
Being subjected to hateful words changes us both psychologically and physically.
Words are very much tangible. And using them is active participation.
We’re backward on words
Years ago, a trip to Charleston, South Carolina blew my ever-loving mind. Every other block I found another monument to the confederacy or the confederate dead. Being from Michigan, where none of that is present, I found the pervasiveness of it entirely unnerving.
Learning later that most of these were erected during Jim Crow and the rise of the KKK to support white supremacy capstoned the feeling I already had.
While the south valorizes our traitors, Germany does the opposite. It memorializes the millions killed in
We are actively and intentionally avoiding the truth of our history. But in doing so, we’re allowing our own people to distort it and recreate it—overwriting the hard drive with a fake history of The Lost Cause. Rather than protect our most vulnerable from the ravages and tyranny of the majority, we’re condemning them to it.
Unequal Honor
As I read The Field of Blood by Joanne Freeman, I was constantly bombarded by this really modern challenge in their experience. How words served to manipulate and coerce unequally.
And most prominently was the issue of honor.
We’ve all seen that strange way of speaking members of Congress have. How they can’t actually say each others’ names or speak directly to them. It’s like everybody is that annoying person speaking of himself in the third person.
This was intentional, of course. Thomas Jefferson knew how abusive people could be to one another. And as a southerner, he understood the tyranny behind the south’s honor code.
Jefferson tried to circumvent the likely result of putting that many people into a room together: he knew that without order, the vulgar names and the accusations would fly. So he outlawed direct address and name-calling. You will be punished if you call someone a liar, for instance.
But with the South’s beloved honor code, you also couldn’t insinuate someone has lied. Even when they have. And if you say something, well…they’d be “forced” to challenge you to a duel.
Rather than preserve decency and honest debate, it broke it. They could just use their own weapon of distorting words. Has the gentleman from Massachusetts accused me of lying? And he’s left thinking Well…you do call yourself a Christian, but the gospels seem alien to you…
It also wouldn’t matter that dueling was outlawed on the floor or in the District. They’d just overlook that rule.
We’re not all hot air
The problem with putting words and tweets into this walled off and eternally protected free speech bucket is that it never lets us deal with the myriad of other buckets these words need to be in. It allows us to settle on overly simplistic ideas of how things are and who we are called to be.
It lets us throw up our hands and claim we’re all liars. So what’s the point of being honest? Which is a way of taking a sliver of truth and making it the cornerstone of a new
Isolating words in an attempt to protect free speech or diminish their impact is a devastating act of distortion. Words are too powerful to pretend they are meaningless. Of course, only when the idea suits us.
The multi-bucket hypothesis
Of course, the natural question is “what do we do then?”
Just as we already often make this mistake, we also often correct it. We can naturally tell the difference between terrible lies and little ones, for instance. Even if we can’t exactly figure out how to legislate the difference.
Jefferson wasn’t wrong in trying to protect Congress from devolving into division. The problem was that leaders who followed him didn’t protect the spirit of the rules. They found exploiting the rules was far easier than they should have been.
In recent times, we’ve seen a similar intentional erosion in the spirit of the rules. Particularly those rules intended to protect the masses from the will of the few. This has been born out at the highest court in actively restricting the punishment of racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ acts to our ability to read people’s minds or to determine corruption by how effective the person was at getting an influencer what they wanted.
Rather than protect the truth, these choices completely distort it.
The true enemy
The problem with these decisions is plain, but a more perfect solution is less so. However, in avoiding the limits of our freedom, we’ve not only let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We’ve let even a sideways glance toward more perfect to be the executioner of the good.
In essence, we’ve allowed such distortion of language to so infect our ordering of society that we’ve undermined the very notion of free speech itself.
All speech isn’t “free” when the oppressed can’t speak.
Much like the framers of the constitution understood the delicate balance of freedom being dependent on both promoting liberty and protecting liberty for all persons, we must recognize how language must be protected and restricted. For the unfettered speech of the abuser will necessarily restrict the speech of the abused.
This will be our true test of character. Not only in our willingness and skill at resisting lies and distortions, which would be bad enough. Or in our eagerness to protect the speech of every other person, a moral high road far easier to traverse than we think. But to do both of these and trust our neighbors to do the same.
For the enemy of free speech has come throughout our history dressed, not as a Nazi, but the official who says about the Nazi “We have to let him speak. There’s no other choice.”
This is the fourth of several reflections on The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman focusing on what this period could teach us about today.
Other reflections include: