by Joe Miller
A quarter century ago, I rang in the new millennium right here in Pocahontas County.
My brother worked in the marketing department at Snowshoe at the time, and my family spent the holiday all crammed into his little cabin, off a dreadfully rutted road just across from the old Boyer Motel. Josh had already started making the transition from graphic designer to software developer and knew enough to realize that the Y2K bug was a real issue, but that we got on it early enough that it was unlikely to create major problems.
If you’d asked me then to predict what might be going on in America in 25 years, I would not in a million tries have come up with, “The guy from The Art of the Deal uses the powers of presidency to get one of the co-hosts of The Man Show fired.”
And yet, here we are, embroiled in a free speech crisis with one main character who rose to fame by having women in bikinis jump on trampolines and another main character who has bragged of entering the dressing rooms of beauty pageant contestants uninvited.
Gottfried Leibniz, the 17th century German philosopher and mathematician, famously argued that ours is the best of all possible worlds. I’m beginning to fear that we might, contra Leibniz, live in the stupidest of all possible worlds.
I wrote about free speech just a couple of weeks ago. A few hours after that column was published, Charlie Kirk was assassinated in public, right in front of his family. The alleged killer reportedly murdered Kirk over his political beliefs.
Killing a person to prevent him from speaking is wrong.
I do not care what it is that a person says. It does not matter in the slightest whether I agree or disagree with the content of their speech. It does not matter if they call for policies that I find to be tasteless or offensive or grossly immoral.
No one should be murdered for their political beliefs.
To their credit, public officials on both the left and the right swiftly denounced Kirk’s murder. Millions of ordinary Americans did so, too.
A distressingly large number of extremely loud, extremely online people on the left celebrated Kirk’s murder.
That is also horrifying. It is, frankly, uncivilized behavior.
I mean “uncivilized” literally here.
It’s a natural human impulse to take glee in the downfall of our enemies, in much the same way that it’s a natural human impulse to take whatever we can from anyone weaker than we are. We are tribal creatures. Left to our own devices, we form very small groups and interact with other groups on a zero-sum basis.
They have the good apple tree. Let’s go club them over the head and take their apples.
But we’re also smart enough to realize that living that way leads to a life that the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes describes as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
When we come together to form a civil society, we collectively agree to put aside our natural impulses to mistreat rival tribes. We agree to a particular set of rules, and we form a government whose main function is to ensure that we abide by our agreed upon rules.
Here in the U.S., our rules are specified in the Constitution. We’re a country full of people who disagree about the best way to live. So, we compromise by guaranteeing everyone the freedom to decide that question for themselves. We have the freedom to associate with whomever we want, to worship however we choose, to vote for our preferred candidates and to speak our minds.
Philosophers have a term for this system of allowing people the freedom to choose how to live: tolerance. You don’t have to agree with your neighbor’s church. You don’t have to approve of their marriage partner. You don’t have to like their friends. You just have to leave them alone.
I worry that we’re witnessing the early stages of a breakdown in that basic social contract.
We’ve begun taking delight in the sadness of those on the other side of the political spectrum. Extremists on the left celebrate the murder of ideological opponents. Extremists on the right enact policies whose sole justification is “owning the libs.”
We’re acting like soccer hooligans, only one team has badges and the keys to the jails, and they are using those tools of the state to silence their opponents.
That might sound good when your team has the badges and the keys. It’ll sound a lot less good when the tools of the state inevitably change hands.
We could play tit-for-tat, each side escalating its attacks on its opponents while it holds the reins of government. That game will inevitably end in despotism.
Or we could rediscover the power of tolerance. It’s served us pretty well for the last 250 years. There’s no reason to think it can’t keep right on doing that.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
