In the years since Hayek’s death economic freedom around the world has been increasing, and liberal values such as human rights, the rule of law, equal freedom under law, and free access to information have spread to new areas.
But today classical liberalism is under attack from such disparate yet symbiotic ideologies as resurgent leftism, right-wing authoritarian populism, and radical political Islamism.
The most recent wave of assault on free speech is being carried out by the students themselves.The toleration of unpopular and even offensive opinions was once considered central to the purpose of a liberal education, which was not to indoctrinate students dogmatically but to teach them how to form beliefs in what Mill called “a manner worthy of intelligent beings”: by critically assessing the best arguments on all sides.
Mill believed the best way for students to form their own beliefs is through adverse discussion–the confrontation of opposing arguments. His arguments anticipate several psychological phenomena, three of those are epistemic closure, group polarization and confirmation bias, which are widely recognized today. Epistemic closure is the tendency to restrict ones sources of information to those that one agrees with. Group polarization explains how like-minded views become more extreme in the absence of dissent. Confirmation bias describes the tendency to focus on evidence that supports one’s views, discounting contrary evidence. All three of these tend to undermine the justification of our beliefs, supporting the notion that the toleration of unpopular opinions is necessary to gain knowledge.
Jacobson observes that there has been a recent power shift in academia from liberals who value toleration to progressives who want to stifle it for political purposes. A postmodern challenge states that free speech is impossible because censorship is bound to happen. The progressive challenge advances the postmodern challenge by claiming that free speech should be sacrificed equally to advance the interests of the disadvantaged over the privileged. The multiculturalist challenge holds that certain opinions constitute literal violence and should not be tolerated at all. These challenges build pressure to support a heckler’s veto–denying the rights of those who disagree with popular opinion from sharing their views.
These developments are ironic in the sense that they reinforce both of the liberal arguments for freedom of speech: the freedom of speech is a natural right and that its acceptance best promotes human flourishing. Progressives on campus interpret the natural rights argument to mean that students have a natural right to a safe space free from offensive opinions and sentiments, and this natural right justifies banning certain speech to promote the utility of human flourishing. This interpretation has resulted in everything from trigger warnings and safe spaces to the actual resignations of professors who challenge these sentiments, sending a dangerous message to all campuses that adverse discussion is not welcome.
“This movement encourages the cultivation of intellectual vices that are antithetical to an intellectually diverse society by granting power to the thin-skinned and the hotheaded—or at any rate to those most ready to claim injury or to threaten violence,” concludes Jacobson. “And it does so subversively, by pretending to enforce norms of civility and tolerance, while doing violence to the classically liberal ideals of a freethinking and intellectually diverse university.”
As the unfolding events in Ferguson, MO—a town of 21,000 outside of St. Louis—demonstrate, America’s domestic police forces have come to resemble the standing armies the Founders feared.
“Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb?,” asks Cato’s Walter Olson. Why fire tear gas canisters at people standing in their own yards? “Shock and awe” tactics are fast becoming the new normal as federal policy has fed an unhealthy warrior mentality among what used to be called “peace officers”—with federal subsidies and Pentagon giveaways of military ordnance.
The clampdown in Ferguson highlights the dangers of our drift toward paramilitary policing, as well as the broader trend of law-enforcement lawlessness documented by Cato’s National Police Misconduct Reporting Project.
President Barack Obama this coming week will be meeting 50 African leaders to discuss “America’s commitment to Africa’s security, its democratic development, and its people.” However, a new bulletin from Cato scholars Marian L. Tupy and Dalibor Rohac reminds us that African problems cannot be solved in Western capitals.
“Persistent poverty in Africa is caused primarily by flawed domestic policies and institutions,” say Tupy and Rohac. “African governments must ultimately embrace the free market reforms that have made other regions of the world prosper.”
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