What Do We Need Besides Free Speech?
Free speech is only part of what's necessary to have hard discussions. Jonathan Rauch has found the other ingredients for productive thought spaces.
There is no shortage of thinkers advocating for free speech, and they’re right to fight for it. Allowing every opinion to be aired prevents tyrannical governments from stifling thought. The United States can’t suppress ideas as the Chinese government polices public opinion or as the Ottoman Empire suppressed the printing press.
But once everyone is free to speak, we need ground rules to set conversations that pursue truth apart from those that fail to. Raw security and war footage may count as free speech under Elon Musk’s X, but it’s not enlightening content.
Jonathan Rauch has listed these additional rules in The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. It builds on one of his previous books, in which he defends free speech. The constitution of knowledge is a list of conditions for conversations that can produce knowledge instead of shouting freely expressed ideas that lead to dead ends.
Seeking Truth Rarely Means Seeking Truth
One of the surprising things about the truth is that it can rarely be reached. The truth behind facts can be known. Whether a politician said something or whether an event occurred can be definitively known. But once we get beyond facts to analysis and large worldviews, our approach has to change from fact-gathering. Rauch explains:
“For the skeptic, the job of knowledge-seekers is to search for truth, which, unfortunately, is unobtainable. For the fallibility, the job is rather to search for error — and error is something we can find…No matter how many flying birds we see, we cannot positively say that all birds can fly; but as soon as we see a flightless bird, we know that not all birds can fly. And so we can claim knowledge, provided we always take seriously the idea that we might be wrong.”
When you want to make an argument, you probably find evidence that supports your idea. That’s an important step. But if you want to juice your argument up, you have to try to prove yourself wrong.
This is how scientists make breakthroughs in medicine. They use double-blind trials to see whether a new drug has a real impact or whether a placebo effect. If scientists only ran experiments to prove themselves right, they’d end up with many false positives. They’d be led into mistaking new drugs worked when another factor like rest or diet could’ve led to the patient’s recovery instead.
When we focus on shaving errors off our ideas, we not only get sharper. We also produce the three public goods Rauch believes a healthy epistemic environment should create.
Three Public Intellectual Goods
Being open to error doesn’t mean that you have to take every argument seriously. It’s all the more reason to blow off unreasonable conspiracies.
All it means is you’ll have to take in occasionally inconvenient facts and shift. Unless you’re coming from an extreme belief system, your worldview won’t do a 180. Your values will still be important to you, but your ideas will contain more nuance and clash more effectively against ideological opponents.
Rauch lays out the end products that must be produced by this improved approach to public discourse:
“First, knowledge. The system should be competent at distinguishing reality from non-reality, and at building on previous discoveries so that knowledge accumulates, thereby generating even more knowledge.”
“Second, freedom. The system should encourage rather than repress human autonomy, creativity, and empowerment. It should welcome and exploit human diversity, especially diversity of opinion, and it should not allow any person or faction to use force or intimidation to control what others say or believe.”
“Third, peace. The system should reward social conciliation, maximize the number of disagreements which are resolvable, and compartmentalize and marginalize disagreemnts when it cannot resolve them. It should inculcate intellectual values which abhor violence and bullying, and it should establish institutions and norms which tolerate and even embrace disagreement and doubt.”
The point of civil discourse isn’t to please everyone. To paraphrase Karl Popper, it’s to have our ideas live and die instead of ourselves. We don’t want a repeat of The Thrity Years’ War, when present-day Germany’s population was reduced by half in a war between Catholics and Protestants. That kind of destruction over who the right kind of Christian was can’t happen in a system that both allows free speech and is open to self-criticism and reflection.
The benefits go well past religion. Everything from small talk to politics benefits from groups deciding to have their ideas continually refined instead of set in stone and backed by arms.
Making exceptions to these rules to fight dangerous ideas ends poorly. Every method of information warfare availalbe to you is availalbe to your worst enemy.
Think about the weapons you want availalbe to both you and the people who disagree with most. It’s a calculation that will put you ahead of many would-be thinkers.