Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

by Jonathan Rauch

Do not block the way of inquiry. —Charles Sanders Peirce

Rauch is a reasonable man whose only mistake is one common among the temperate: he assumes that others are as reasonable as he is.

A very dangerous principle is now being established as a social right: Thou shalt not hurt others with words. This principle is a menace—and not just to civil liberties. At bottom it threatens liberal inquiry—that is, science itself.

This book is about the liberal social system for sorting truth from falsehood: arguably our greatest and most successful political system. It is also about that system’s political enemies: not only the ancient enemies, the old-fashioned authoritarians, but also the newer ones, the egalitarians and humanitarians.

This book tries to defend the morality, rather than the legality, of a knowledge-producing social system which often causes real suffering to real people.

The liberal regime for making knowledge is not something most of us have ever even thought about. That fact is a tribute to its success. Sadly, it is also a reason so many Americans are dozing through the current attack.

• The Liberal Principle: Checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.

Impelled by the notions that science is oppression and criticism is violence, the central regulation of debate and inquiry is returning to respectability—this time in a humanitarian disguise.

the old principle of the Inquisition is being revived: people who hold wrong and hurtful opinions should be punished for the good of society.

Strange to use words like “Inquisition” and “thought vigilantes.” What has happened? And why now? Consider, then, the stories of two new challenges to liberal science. One story is about fairness, the other about compassion.

Now came others arguing that the question of America’s constitutional heritage was too important to be left to the conventional historians, who are biased by dint of being privileged white males.

The biologist and feminist theorist Ruth Hubbard says, in a phrase that could come from any of a variety of contemporary writers on knowledge, “The pretense that science is objective, apolitical and value-neutral is profoundly political.”

Liberal science does not throw its opponents in jail, but it does deny their beliefs respectability, and to deny respectability is to cause anguish and outrage.

The truth is that liberal science insists absolutely on freedom of belief and speech, but freedom of knowledge it rejects absolutely.

H. L. Mencken taunted them as Puritans—people driven by the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

Alongside and underlying the puritanical moral fear was the objection that people and communities were being hurt by foul words or gross images.

To ban books or words which cretins find exciting is to let the very lowest among us determine what we may read or hear.

How, then, do we know if pornography is really doing the harm that feminists allege? Because it must be.

The old, and admittedly sometimes tricky, distinction between talk and action was being methodically blurred—and not just in theory.

So here was a theory which said that images and expressions and words could be, for all practical purposes, a form of hurt or violence. Keep your eye on this theory. Remember its face: you will see it again.

As more and more people realized that they could win concessions and moral victories by being offended, more and more offended people became activists.

The humanitarians had discovered what liberals rarely realize and almost never admit: the liberal intellectual system, whatever else it may be, is not “nice.”

Somehow the idea has grown up that “liberal” means “nice,” that the liberal intellectual system fosters sensitivity, toleration, self-esteem, the rejection of prejudice and bias.

The truth is that liberal science demands discipline as well as license, and to those who reject or flout its rules, it can be cruel. It excl...

To advance knowledge, we must all sometimes suffer. Worse than that, we must inflict suffering on others.

We liberals will never be able to answer those complaints honestly or consistently until we grit our teeth and admit the truth. Yes, Rushdie’s words caused many people anger and pain. And that is all right.

without the freedom to offend, freedom of expression ceases to exist.

Its strong moral traction tugs at anyone who cares about others, and it has a wonderful moral clarity: Thou shalt not hurt others with words.

Intellectual authoritarianism, so long disgraced, was returning to favor—

the humanitarians who called for bans on “insults, harassment, disrespect and obscenity” had seized the moral offensive.

One challenge says that the liberal intellectual system is unfair, the other that it is hurtful, both that it must therefore be regulated.

We will pay a heavy price if the principle takes root in our ethical code that the offended, having been hurt, have the right to an apology and to redress.

What is the right answer to the person who demands something because he is offended? Just this: “Too bad, but you’ll live.”

As for people who call for punishment of “racists,” “homophobes,” “sexists,” “blasphemers,” “Communists,” or whoever the bogeyman happens to be—those people are enemies of inquiry and their clamor deserves only to be ignored, never humored.

there are not two great liberal social and political systems but three. One is democracy—political liberalism—by which we decide who is entitled to use force; another is capitalism—economic liberalism—by which we decide how to allocate resources. The third is liberal science, by which we decide who is right.

Its great advantages as a social system for raising and settling differences of opinion are inherent,

the alternatives to liberal science lead straight to authoritarianism.

Fundamentalists want to protect the truth. Egalitarians want to help the oppressed and let in the excluded. Humanitarians want to stop verbal violence and the pain it causes. The three impulses are now working in concert.

fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong.

there is no way to advance knowledge peacefully and productively by adhering to the principles advocated by egalitarians and humanitarians.

We are not afraid of your science and of your technology. We are afraid of your ideas and of your customs. Which means that we fear you politically and socially.”

Liberal science is not, finally, a way of making things. It is a way of organizing society and a way of behaving.

No one has more sublimely argued that opinion must be regulated for the good of society.

There are many reasons to read Plato, among them the beauty and plasticity of his thought and the delightful character of Socrates, but surely one of the best reasons to read him is to be horrified.

Plato’s shining vision is immediately appealing, and you have to think hard about it to see why it is bad. It holds out the promise of governance by the enlightened and humane, of relief from the foolish and unreasonable, of shelter from uncertainty and change.

“We must begin, then, it seems, by a censorship over our story-makers”

Liberalism holds that knowledge comes only from a public process of critical exchange, in which the wise and unwise alike participate.

Only to those who are capable of right knowledge should truth and power be entrusted.

There must be no Salman Rushdie in Plato’s Republic. If such a person were somehow to survive the state-controlled education with his ambitions intact, he would have to be eliminated.

Plato knew better. The subject of epistemology is the nature and limits of human knowledge.