FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread

[grarpamp]

The Censored Generation

https://mises.org/wire/censored-generation

Incredulity. Astonishment. Disgust. Anger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IEFD_JVYd0
https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell
https://www.amazon.com/Foreign-Correspondent-Night-Soldiers/dp/0812967976

It is these feelings—amongst others—that describe the general reaction
to the revelations of the Twitter Files and other egregious episodes
of Big Tech censorship of the electronic public square.

The implicit deal with companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.
is very simple: we will look at your ads if you give us a service for
free. The deal did not include censorship.

But what is society to expect when those doing the censorship seem to
see absolutely nothing wrong with it, and that it didn’t even occur to
them that what they were engaged in—often at the specific request of
governmental agencies—was at all a problem?

For a generation that has grown up with speech codes, enforced nicety,
automatic deference to the feelings of others, and has been swaddled
in bubble wrap against the vagaries of life, censoring of speech is
not only not an ethical leap, it is the right thing to do.

Couple that with a permanent, purposeful self-infantilization that
makes them defer to (or incoherently rage at for NOT censoring speech)
anyone they perceive to be a grown-up—such as former FBI bigwig James
Baker at Twitter—and the stage is not only set, but the terrifying end
of the play writes itself.

This generation is not necessarily Y, or X, or millennial—it’s a bit
of a mix of those aged from about sixteen to about thirty-six, numbers
that will, sadly, most likely become lower and lower on the low end
and higher and higher on the high end as time marches on.

It is a subcohort (I thought it best to learn their language) of
people who have much in common—first, they have come from the now de
rigueur smaller families, hence they do not have the thick skin and
personal combat skills that one acquires when one has siblings.

They have usually grown up relatively comfortably and are
uncomfortable with confrontation. They went to the right schools, but
they do not understand how other people can think differently. They
are overcredentialed but actually vastly undereducated. They feel
twinges of guilt when the grocery store delivers but are absolutely
certain that a twenty-five-minute trip to the store is a waste of
their valuable time.

While there are many, many examples, two events stand out as exemplar
moments for the censored generation. First, this rather well-known
incident from Yale University in which a college student is angrily
demanding to be treated like a child, and this chilling tale of a
professor struggling to deal with the “best and the brightest”
demanding to be lectured to rather than participate in a thoughtful
seminar.

Professor Vincent Lloyd, director of black studies at Villanova
University, writes:

    Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of
the current discourse on race in the United States. But now my
thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations
imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades
leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. How
did this happen to a group of bright-eyed high school students?

This remembrance of things past, as it were, should not be viewed as
garden variety “Get off my lawn!” generational angst. This is not,
when complaining about Elvis Presley’s hips, purposefully failing to
remember exactly how much underwear was visible at a 1940s swing
dance.

These two examples starkly show that a sea change has occurred in just
the past ten or fifteen years. It is simply unimaginable that students
prior would have demanded more boundaries, more restrictions, more
lectures, more being told what to think, and, especially, more being
told how to think.

It literally has never happened before.

This, to quote Alan Furst’s book The Foreign Correspondent, “doctrinal
agony over symbols” has always existed, but it only flourished in
insular monomaniacal environments, like the cloisters of a medieval
monastery or a dingy backroom full of bickering Bolsheviks. Now, these
ultimately meaningless disputes capture much of the globe’s attention
and involve a race to the bottom of dogma, to a purity purgatory
which, thanks to the speed of social media, has engulfed us all.

The past has seen its share of equivalent events and trends, but the
speed at which “facts” and thoughts and concepts move on the internet
essentially destroys the usual “predators” of bad ideas—nuance,
history, research, reason, time to reflect, reliable sourcing, and
proper context. This has allowed people to simply ignore or dismiss
anything they think may contravene their own ideations and the
ideations of whatever happens to be ascendent that particular day. It
is this permanent state of flux, intentionally unmoored from the evil
past and its expectations, that allows the unthinkable to not only be
thought but to be acted upon.

And because this is the only world—a world in nonchalant
destruction—the censored generation has ever known, it is only natural
that they are so terrified of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong
thing, straying too far from the dictate of the day that they cannot
grasp the enormity of their actions.

The astonishment of North Korea defector Yeomani Park as she has wound
her way through Columbia University—“I realized, wow, this is insane.
I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what
I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”—is a warning that
should be heeded but has not. It is the ultimate outsider noticing
what others cannot or will not, and it is disturbing to the core. Or
at least it would be if it were not so dejectedly unsurprising.

This abandonment by putative progressives of the most cherished
progressive position—all can speak, all can be heard, and you can
decide to listen or not—is beginning to wear thin on even the older
left-of-centers. Joyce Carol Oates touched off a Twitter storm—of
course, sigh—when she savaged the recent announcement of the
posthumous reediting of the work of Roald Dahl by sensitivity readers
hired by the publishing house.

For his part, Richard Dawkins—again, not a card-carrying
conservative—said recently when asked about proposed elimination of
the use of words like “man” or “woman” from scientific papers, “I am
not going to be told by some teenage version of Mrs. Grundy which
words of my native language I may or may not use.”

But it will take more than shame for the censored generation to
understand its own aggressive emptiness. It is not until the system
that created them, credentialed them, and now employs them changes
itself that they will be able to see themselves differently, as
discrete individuals capable of freedom of thought and capable of
allowing others that same basic right.

And those systems—educational, governmental, financial, social,
cultural—have no reason to change.

For now.