Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

by Jonathan Rauch

Not long ago in America, punishing wrong believers along with wrong beliefs was the specialty of the right wing. That was what McCarthyism was all about. If you were a believer in communism, it was not just your belief, your “ism,” which was bad, but you. You were a “Communist”: not merely wrong in your political opinions but wrong, dangerous, and evil as a whole human being. You were not fit to live in American society. You were required to wear the scarlet letter C. What the right wing did in those years was unforgivable. Now it is the left wing which has taken up where the right wing left off, a fact of which I could not be more ashamed. It is appropriate and entirely right to criticize propositions which we believe are false or immoral. But nowadays what you hear is less often a criticism of the proposition than of the person. We condemn not racism in particular but “racists”—whole human beings. A single offensive statement and you are marked as an evil believer, one whose beliefs can all be sealed together in a box stamped “wicked person”—one who has fallen from grace and who by rights should be turned out of society altogether. Apologize, reform, recant, or lose your job.

Where ye find fundamentalist righteousness, there shall ye find the totalitarian idea.

McCarthyism, in its day, never caught on among professionals in the knowledge business, among academics and journalists. Terrible it is to see that this time around the movement to condemn the mistaken along with their errors is widely respected among the very people who most depend on the freedom to err. Intellectuals are losing their nerve or their souls, or both.

The credo of liberal science imposes upon each of us two moral obligations: to allow everybody to err and criticize, even obnoxiously, and to submit everybody’s beliefs—including our own—to public checking before claiming that they deserve to be accepted as knowledge. Today, activists and moralists are assailing both halves of the creed. They are assailing the right to err and criticize, when the error seems outrageous or the criticism seems hurtful; they are assailing the requirement for public checking, when the result is to reject someone’s belief. They have a right to pursue their attack (nonviolently), but they, and we, should understand that they are enemies of science itself, and even, ultimately, of freedom of thought. And those of us who hold sacred the right to err and the duty to check need to understand that our defense of liberal science must preach not only toleration but discipline: the hard self-discipline which requires us to live with offense.

the attempt to equate criticism with violence is nothing more than an attempt to delegitimize and muzzle people you disagree with.

Stop; enough. The time has come for a reevaluation and a decision. The time has come to look about us, collect our wits, and stand firm on these principles: No one is allowed the right to end any debate, or to claim special control over it or exemption from it. No one under any circumstances is exempt from criticism of any kind, however unpleasant. No one will be punished for the beliefs he holds or the opinions he states, because to believe incorrectly is never a crime. Criticism, however unpleasant, is not violence. Except in cases where violence or vandalism is threatened or incited, the very notion of “words that wound” or “verbal harassment” is to be repudiated and junked. Those who claim to be hurt by words must be led to expect nothing as compensation. Otherwise, once they learn they can get something by claiming to be hurt, they will go into the business of being offended. We must all be sensitive not only to others’ feelings but also to our obligations to liberal science: specifically, the obligation to put up with criticism—yes, offense—from any quarter at any time. We have a positive moral obligation to be thick-skinned. When we do become offended, as we all will, we must settle for responding with criticism or contempt, and stop short of demanding that the offender be punished or required to make restitution. If you are unwilling to shoulder that obligation, if you insist on punishing people who say or believe “hurtful” things (as opposed to telling them why th...

“A rabbi whose community does not disagree with him is not really a rabbi, and a rabbi who fears his community is not really a man.”

What hurts us is not wrong-thinking people but propaganda and ignorance; and unfettered criticism—liberal science—is the cure, not the disease.

The greater miracle, then, is not the moral law within us but the moral knowledge without.

The answer to bias and prejudice is pluralism, not purism. The answer, that is, is not to try to legislate bias and prejudice out of existence or to drive them underground, but to pit biases and prejudices against each other and make them fight in the open. That is how, in the crucible of rational criticism, moral error is burned away.

our duty is to protect others’ freedom to be wrong, the better to ensure society’s odds of being right.