In the century and a half that has followed the first Civil War, we have seen the futility of trying to legislate equality.
The extreme difficulty of making an entire society behave in ways they do not wish to behave is only part of the problem. It is one aspect of human nature over which the law has little power. Another is the fluidity of the concept of equality itself.
All men being created equal, and their being equal under the law, does not entail universal equality of their condition. In any society that makes all people free, the people will not be equal in their situations. In any society that makes all people equal in situation, the people cannot be free. This is not an either-or choice. We can be more free and less equal, or more equal and less free. We cannot be entirely both, but we can choose how much of one we will have by giving up some of the other. Reformers who would prioritize one must, if they are honest, admit to disparaging the other.
I will not argue here for my own priority, but I will state it. As I approach the end of my life, my current situation is not at all to my liking. Despite the advantages of my belonging to no officially recognized victim class, I remain very disadvantaged. The law denies me no opportunities that others have, but I still lack most opportunities that I wish I had.
Even so, there is no liberty that I would forfeit or would deny to other people in order to gain those missing opportunities, or to have had those opportunities when they could have done me more good than they would now.
But, that is just me. Why should others see things my way?
The point is not whether anyone should agree with me. Or whether they should agree with progressives, or with liberals, or with conservatives, or with Trump's supporters, or with libertarians, or with whomever. The point is whether any of our nation's currently warring factions are offering the nation's people any good reasons to agree with them.
We don’t have to believe we are better to believe we are right. But without an apologetic employing the proper exercise of reason, we are unlikely to have any other reason. We’re then stuck with some version of “God is on our side.” A secularist tribe that claims the moral high ground is in no better rhetorical position than the people who burned heretics while claiming they were following God's orders. And you'd better believe that some secularists are very much engaged in the metaphorical burning of witches these days. Literal witch-burning is certainly more evil than the metaphorical kind, but the lesser evil is still an evil.
It is good that we don't burn witches any more. That is progress of the sort that Steven Pinker discussed in The Better Angels of Our Nature. Not so good is the persistence of a notion that heretics ought to be silenced somehow, that we must find some way to prevent people from hearing what they have to say.
The reasons why it is not good were summarized in a book published last year, All Minus One: John Stuart Mill's Ideas on Free Speech Illustrated, by Jonathon Haidt and Richard V. Reeves. It is an abridgment, in the style of Reader's Digest, of the second chapter of Mill's book On Liberty. The original is well worth reading, but the Victorian prose can be off-putting, and this book is a good alternative.
Mill's argument can be bullet-pointed as follows.
Mill also addresses the naivete of thinking the truth must ultimately triumph in any free debate. On Liberty was published in the same year, 1859, as Darwin's Origin of Species. I have no idea whether Mill was even aware of Darwin's work, and he could not have had any notion of evolutionary psychology, which didn't come around until the late 20th century. But we now know, and Mill obviously intuited, that the human brain doesn't come equipped with a truth detector. In a free market of ideas, error can prevail and it often has. We don't want to allow free speech because "truth will out" or any such nonsense. We want to allow free speech for the same reason we want democracy: Whether it be good or bad, all the alternatives are worse.
A society that cares more about defending truth than about protecting its orthodoxies will maximize the opportunities for truth to prevail, and it cannot do that by silencing anyone. Yes, the people will at times be misled by charismatic demagogues, but the only solution is to leave the advocates of truth free to mount their counterattacks. Any government or other institution with the power to deny free speech to the advocates of heresy can just as easily deny it to the advocates of truth — and it is more likely to, if history is any guide. No government, and no other institution, can legitimately say, "Trust us. We can tell the difference."
(This page last updated on November 29, 2019.)