Elon Musk thinks he’s striking a victory for free speech. But responsibility is what people are fighting over.
An Analogy:
There’s a favorite phrase: Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. The realist knows what’s being argued here. And its absurdity. Guns make the killing simple and efficient—it’s clearly an extension of the person.
What this view also does is isolate the weapon from the action. Make it an objective truth; irrelevant to the conversation. But it clearly isn’t. Incidents of homicide and suicide escalate by factors of three and four when guns are involved.
These objects do not have a neutral effect. Nor is there scientific utility to pretending they’re neutral. Isolating guns from gun violence only has ideological utility. A kind of philosophical cleverness that allows us to pretend this neutrality is necessary.
Not only is it not necessary, it is morally dishonest to pretend the gun is unrelated to gun violence.
This vision of imposed neutrality can be found in hundreds of areas in the postmodern era. But other than guns, it is perhaps most beguiling in debates about free speech.
The Gist:
We have a half-definition of free speech in the U.S., where we are compelled to see unrestricted speech as not only the ideal. It must be reality.
This is ludicrous.
It is impossible to live without restriction because no human can ever truly live without encountering anyone else. And in the encounter with another person, we cannot not restrict one another.
Absolutism, like free speech absolutism, is extremism. And it is something far worse than that. It is an extremism that is philosophically dishonest. Refusing to acknowledge half of the conversation is deceitful.
Bringing Back the Racists:
As a self-described free speech absolutist, Elon Musk has vowed to bring those people back to Twitter who have been kicked out. The vast majority of these being people who had violated the terms of service around hate speech and violence.
The absolutists would have you utterly ignore any relationship between Musk, his vision of speech, the platform, the racists, or any other aspect of this moment. Like it was an accident and not an obvious result of the rhetoric.
They want you to believe free speech, like Twitter itself, is neutral. As if the extreme version of the ideal can, itself, regulate reality.
The thing about separating the ideal from reality: it always gets to be right. And racism just gets to be an accident.
Just like dead school children. Segregated schools and neighborhoods. Income disparities. All of it just a crazy coincidence. Nobody responsible for laws relating to guns, redlining, or wealth. And in mature, civil society, it just seems like there’s nothing we could possibly do about any of it.
That’s the lie we all seem willing to accept as normal. But the truth is that none of us needs to.