LSP50: Where to Draw the Line on Free Speech? Conscience in the Identity Politics Debate

On this morning's National Post website (February 18, 2017), there's a commentary piece with this headline: "Where to draw the line on free speech? It needs to be guided by judgment and conscience, not rules." The author, Andrew Coyne, raises some good points about mutual obligations in a democratic society such as Canada's. He points out that "the spirit of free speech" is important, that "free speech exists, as a legal guarantee, in part because of the foundation of social values in which it is embedded."

What the author doesn't address in his very reasonable piece about free speech is the underlying crisis our society currently faces with regard to conscience. Conscience -- the source of our ineffable and awe-inspiring courage and inner strength -- is quickly and efficiently being killed off in our society. Without conscience, we simply aren't able to understand our mutual obligations, let alone grasp the meaning of "the spirit of free speech." Without conscience, we don't have the courage to recognize and confront hatred. Without conscience, we stagger from crisis to crisis and hurl cliches instead of insight at complex issues. Without conscience, we can't hold the line against any of the philosophical movements designed to eradicate differences between individual human beings and our neighbours. Without conscience, we start to believe there's only one right way to be: our way or the highway.

In short, without conscience, people aren't able to be the loving and potential-filled individuals we're capable of being.

 

The foundation of social values in which "the spirit of free speech" resides is due in large part to the long arc of Christian values that have slowly evolved over the centuries. Despite a history riddled with Christian leaders who perpetrated mistakes and terrible abuses (some of which have been acknowledged and atoned for), one important aspect of Christianity (and Judaism before it) is the strong emphasis placed on women's worthiness before God. You can't have a fully functioning human conscience unless you're willing to trust that God does not place men above women in Creation or in human society. Shown here is "The Vision of the Blessed Clare of Rimini" by Francesco da Rimini (prob. about 1333-40), on display at the National Gallery, London, UK. Photo credit JAT 2023.

In place of conscience, without much awareness that what we're doing is dangerous to our longstanding sense of social values, we're tacking together a murky blend of laws, ideologies, logic, and dualistic right-and-wrong morality that currently masquerades under the noble banner of identity politics. Identity politics purports to be a salvific trend which will add to our foundation of judgment and conscience once we totally accept and absorb and see the wisdom of the myriad small but necessary laws that must be put in place -- just temporarily, of course -- to protect certain individuals who believe it's their RIGHT to never feel offended and never feel challenged in their personal beliefs. Identity politics is an ideology designed to give people permission to stop listening to their own conscience and to listen instead only to the System 2 pleasure and happiness networks of their own human brains. The strategy can be summed up in this way: if it gives you a brief neurological high, it's great; if it demands you do the hard work of understand and accepting your neighbour (or yourself!), it's not only awful and unfair, but should be made illegal.

We've seen its ilk before under other names, names such as fascism and totalitarianism and religious fundamentalism of all stripes. These philosophical movements may appear different in the specific political and economic laws they apply to their citizens, but one thing they all have in common is the methods used to eradicate conscience among their citizens. Once you kill off conscience in the majority your citizens, of course, you can do pretty much anything you like, as successful tyrants such as Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot and Mao have shown us.

Regimes such as these -- along with many others now and in the past -- start by trumpeting their claims for Truth. (Obviously, they're not going to tell you it's really a Big Fat Lie.) Next they bombard you with a constant stream of words and speeches and polemical essays filled with countless "wisdom words" (e.g. peace, justice, liberty, equality, fraternity, sacredness, oneness) to try to force their way into the System 1 networks of your brain -- the networks that are responsible for important emotional and spiritual traits such as empathy, courage, trust, love, morality, fidelity, curiosity, patience, and openness to change. These networks are programmed to respond to cues around relationships and learning and purpose, so they're vulnerable to attack through heart-based words (as every spin doctor in history has figured out).

I should stop here and point out that System 1 (what we tend to call "the Heart") is one of two major processing streams used by the brain. The other is System 2 (what we tend to call "the Mind"). Researchers in Dual Process Theory, which posits the operation of two different yet equally important processing systems in the brain, are starting to see both the benefits and the pitfalls of having two brain systems with different priorities that can, under certain circumstances, start to compete with each other -- a problematic situation that all too many people today have experienced firsthand.

Once the non-empathetic but highly logical and fiercely dogmatic leaders of a ideological movement have forced their way into your brain's System 1 networks, they start to chip away at your own natural, built-in sense of self. They try to make you doubt your sense of self. They try to make you doubt that you should even have a sense of self. They try to force relativism on you and they try to force determinism on you (both at the same time!). They tell you there's no such thing as free will (i.e. a conscience through which you can apply your empathy and courage and other System 1 traits). They tell you that because people have no conscience and no free will, chaos will ensue and everyone will become traitorous and cannibalistic zombies who will attack you on the street and rape you and murder you if you don't obey your new leaders. (Of course, these things won't happen if you and your neighbours have a conscience and know how to use it, but what the heck, who needs the truth about conscience when they're shovelling out their Big Fat Lies?)

Once you start to believe these lies, your brain will start to rewire itself to reflect your new beliefs. (This is the principle of neuroplasticity at work, and it's the scientific reality that explains how ideologies can reshape your brain if you're not careful and if you're not paying attention to what you're putting in your brain.) Your brain will try to do what you've told it to do -- it will start to demolish network connections that deal with System 1 emotional and spiritual priorities, and it will try to strengthen connections in the cortical layers that deal with logic, rules, competitiveness, agreeableness, neuroticism, schadenfreude, status, and happiness (which is not the same thing as meaning or purpose). You'll turn yourself into a virtue-signalling member of a hive mind, or, as Star Trek writers describe it, a member of the Borg Collective, or, as Battlestar Galactica writers would say, a Cylon who's going backward instead forward in his or her relationship with Creation and God.

This doorway originally served the narthex of a 19th century Ontario church. Eventually the staircase that led to the door was entirely removed. You can still see the doorway, but you can no longer reach it. This is what can happen to your conscience if you allow System 2 ideologies to dominate your brain. You can still see the words that describe your conscience, but you can no longer access the feelings that accompany a fully functioning interior doorway to wisdom. The part of you that's supposed to express independent free will and conscience becomes all show without actual function. Feelings of depression and anxiety often soon follow. Photo credit JAT 2014.

After you've turned yourself into a member of the hive mind comes the worst part. Your ideological leaders, who with one hand have stripped your brain of its ability to "know where to draw the line," mercifully offer you with the other hand the blueprint you need in order to become a happy and productive member of society. It will be a pure System 2 blueprint, of course, with eradication of anything resembling free will, conscience, empathy, openness to change, plus all the rest of the amazing human traits you're truly capable of. The System 2 blueprint will be presented to you as a salvific act of self-transcendence intended to create more justice and more righteousness for the victims in your society. But really the blueprint is just about the need for certain System 2-dominant brains to compete, to gain power and status, and to take pleasure from the suffering of others who have lost their own ability to tell right from wrong. Tyrants thrive where human hearts suffer.

It's a form of spiritual rape. To enter somebody else's brain and intentionally try to strip away their core sense of self and their access to their own free will and conscience is an unspeakable act of violence.

If we really want to have a society that understands "the spirit of free speech" and the meaning of mutual obligations, we must do everything in our power to raise our children so their brains can process and balance both System 1 and System 2 priorities -- and be able to tell the difference between the two. Only when individuals grow, maintain, and cherish their personal sense of conscience can we act together to recognize tyranny in all its insidious forms.

Conscience is our true protection against tyranny.

LSP48: Parable of the Rift-Sawn Wood

Parable of the Rift-Sawn Wood
 

Built in 1852 in King City, Ontario, this historical wooden train station may be the oldest surviving train station in Canada. Shown here is the ticket window as seen from the ticket master's side. Photo credit JAT 2016.

 
Once upon a time, there was a judge who lived in a small community. Although the judge had no particular claim to either humble kingship or wise judgeship (his training having been in other disciplines altogether), no error of word or grammar or logic or math could escape his perfect eye. Flaws in the words of others shone forth as brightly to him as the sun in the noonday sky, and so, over time, he became a protector of sorts who demonstrated to his little flock the dangers of ill-proved words. He took pride in his calling as upholder of the One True Truth.

One day, during a harsh drought, he decided to build a wooden courthouse at the top of the hill so his humility, stability, and permanence could draw others into the fold of the One True Truth. This, he was certain, would help them cope during their travails.

“I will build a courthouse to rival the halls of Solomon,” he said to the town's citizens. “Those who enter will find only justice. But,” he continued, “the courthouse must mirror to everyone the perfection and permanence of my judgments, so every piece of wood you bring to me must be sawn so the blade runs perpendicular to the rings of springwood and summerwood. These planks are the purest and strongest of all wood. No others will do for our courthouse. Discard all the rest.”

Each piece of wood was brought to the judge for his inspection. He turned each plank this way and that, peering at the rings from all directions, seeking only those boards that mirrored the timeless alternating pattern of springwood and summerwood, springwood and summerwood. He chose each piece with exceeding care. On each one, he chiselled the word Justice.

As the floor and pillars of the courthouse slowly grew, so too did the piles of discards at the base of the hill. In one pile lay the boards that showed small knots, for the judge found evidence of branching deeply troubling and not at all reflective of humility. In a second pile lay the boards and burls that showed curved lines or cupped profiles or uneven grains, for the judge found irregular patterns toxic to his quest for stability. In a third pile, which was by far the largest, lay heaps of tangled roots and rugged, timeworn chunks of bark, for the judge found these ugly and unusable in a courthouse constructed to honour the teachings of the One True Truth.

At last all the trees in a wide radius around the town had been cut down and the courthouse was complete. The judge nodded in satisfaction at his unobstructed view. The building was perfect, right down to the bold name Justice chiselled throughout. But it needed one final touch. This he accomplished himself. In the very centre of the structure, he placed a raised swivel chair upon which he could turn in every direction to see approaching newcomers. Each word they spoke, each point of logic they raised, came easily to his eyes, and made him shake his head in sadness when he saw the knots and burls and roots they carried. According to his duty, he took all newcomers on a tour of his courthouse and patiently showed them the perfection of his planks. And, though it pained him to do so, he eventually sent each one away in tears to seek unblemished pieces of the One True Truth.                       

One autumn day, after a particularly cold, wet spring, and an even colder, wetter summer that had ended the drought, one of the judge’s followers came rushing in. “Sire,” said the follower (for his followers admired him and thought his mastery over words and logic made him wiser than Solomon), “Sire, the rains have caused a terrible mudslide. The rain has poured down the hill and taken all the soil with it. A dangerous river, filled with rampaging branches and roots, has suddenly materialized. The town has been swept away. The roads are destroyed. The fall crops are gone. There is nothing to eat. You and I are the last survivors.”

The judge nodded sadly but wisely. “It was meant to be, my faithful friend. There’s nothing we could have done to prevent this tragedy.”

“What will we do?” said the follower. “How will we survive?”

The judge thought long and hard for several minutes. The answer came to him in a flash of brilliant light, the same flash he always saw when he studied the impoverished words of others. “We’ll take the wood from the courthouse and build ourselves a raft. We’ll travel. We’ll teach. We’ll save. You and I have been blessed with survival because we alone understand the meaning of the One True Truth, which is pure permanence from pure impermanence, pure freedom from pure determinism, pure justice from pure logic.” 

The follower happily obeyed, and soon pillars and lintels had been torn down and refashioned into a raft. In many places, the word Justice peered up at them from the perfectly sawn planks.

“What shall we call our raft now that it’s finished?” said the follower. “Shall we call it Justice?”

“I think not,” said the judge. “You and I have transcended the simple justice of this courthouse. From this moment on, we will name our craft after the greatest law of universal determinism. We will call it . . . Mercy.”